In These Timeshttp://inthesetimes.com/
In These Times features award-winning investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing.Why Keith Ellison and Jeremy Corbyn Think We Should Cap CEO Payhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/21114/maximum-wage-keith-ellison-jeremy-corbyn-income-ceo-pay/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/21114/maximum-wage-keith-ellison-jeremy-corbyn-income-ceo-pay/max·i·mum in·come

noun

1. A legal limit on how much a person can be paid

"Give [the wealthy] awards. Lavish them with praise. Publish the names of the highest taxpayers in laudatory newspaper columns. Allow them to bask in civic pride. But take their money. They have plenty.” — Hamilton Nolan, arguing in Gawker that all income above $5 million a year be taxed at 99 percent

I get why we'd want to raise the minimum wage. But why lower the maximum?

According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO compensation at the 350 highest-revenue publicly traded firms rose 875 percent from 1978 to 2012. Meanwhile, average worker pay at these companies grew a mere 5 percent.

In a world where so many struggle to get by, it’s easy to resent executives making millions. If companies spent less on CEOs, they might put profits toward increasing wages for everyday workers, paying more in taxes or investing in something else useful.

The real trouble with inequality, however, goes deeper than the misallocation of resources or the resentment it creates. It perverts the promise of democracy itself. So long as a tiny minority hoards most of the wealth, these oligarchs are able to exert disproportionate social and political influence.

So how would this actually work?

There are a few different ways to go about it. One would be to pick a limit— some suggest $5 million a year, others $500,000—and tax everything above that at or near 100 percent.

Another would be to incentivize worker pay raises by tying executive salary to employee income. In 2013, a Swiss referendum proposed a 12-to-1 ratio on the logic that a CEO shouldn’t make more in a month than an employee in a year. (It lost, but garnered 35 percent support.) In an In These Timesinterview, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) suggested a less strict 20-to-1 ratio.

This would have been typical in 1965, but today the average ratio is more than 200- to-1. J.C. Penney once hit 1,795-to-1.

Who else is calling for this?

U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and French socialist Jean-Luc Melenchón have both voiced support. Back in 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt suggested a wartime cap at $25,000 a year, around $400,000 in today’s dollars. (He settled for an 88 percent tax rate above $200,000.) If a 100 percent top tax rate sounds out there, remember we had 90 percent under the Republican Eisenhower administration.

These calls challenge us to reckon with extreme inequality and question why, exactly, we consider certain people so much more deserving than others. As a certain German Communist once suggested, perhaps compensation should be “to each, according to his needs.”

]]>Dayton MartindaleTue, 29 May 2018 20:59:00 +0000Don’t Shame Protesters and Park-Goers Over Covid-19 Spreading—Shame Corporations and the Statehttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22579/protest-covid-19-george-floyd-police-racism-coronavirus/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22579/protest-covid-19-george-floyd-police-racism-coronavirus/Amid nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, public health analysts—and the broader public—have debated the large public gatherings’ implications for the spread of Covid-19. According to most accounts, a high proportion of protesters have worn masks, and are gathering outside where transmission is significantly less likely than indoors. Yet they have also gathered in far larger groups than is currently recommended, and are frequently spaced less than six feet apart. Some onlookers are irked by the cognitive dissonance of making exceptions for protests given the urgency of social distancing. Others have countered that fighting systemic racism is a powerful public health measure in itself.

Racial and class disparities in Covid-19 deaths have clarified the shocking degree to which anti-Blackness shapes health outcomes, an issue deeply intertwined with how brutally Black communities are policed. Nonetheless, such arguments in favor of large protests do sit somewhat uncomfortably beside absolutist lockdown measures that have prevailed in many cities and states, some of which have gone so far as to shutter public parks while policing social distancing violations in the name of public health.

But what this debate illustrates is that we should have been thinking differently about risk all along. Coronavirus infection control has taken many forms, including measures such as school and business closures as well as the implementation of new social distancing protocols for services that remain open. It’s also entailed stringent rules governing individual behavior, reinforced by enforcement mechanisms ranging from policing to vitriolic shaming on social media. But there are two fundamental problems with this approach: it frames viral transmission as the result of selfish choices, and misunderstands who gets sick to begin with. Covid-19 is largely spread between people who had little chance to avoid exposure, who were pitted together in their own homes, by the state, or by their bosses.

While all of us should practice sensible, solidaristic risk reduction, more powerful actors—from police forces to politicians and corporations—bear structural responsibility for the extent of the outbreak.

The protests may well turn out to illustrate this very dynamic. While protesters attending the outdoor demonstrations have largely chosen to reduce the risk of transmission by wearing masks, distributing hand sanitizer and spreading out when possible, some of the highest risks were imposed by police: widespread reports depict officers corralling attendees in smaller areas and blocking accessible exits, packing protesters tightly together. Police officers themselves have frequently been observed without masks, and are themselves noted vectors for the coronavirus: at the height of the pandemic, nearly 20% of the New York Police Department was out sick, and police appear to have disproportionately high infection rates.

The use of tear gas by police causes coughing and eye-rubbing, both of which can facilitate the spread of the virus. Over 11,000 arrests nationwide have forced protesters into police custody where the risk of transmission is outlandishly high: people in detention are 2.5 times more likely to contract the virus, and 8 of the country’s 10 largest outbreaks have occurred in correctional facilities. One study found that people filtering in and out of Cook County Jail accounted for over 15% of all cases in the state of Illinois.

Outside of the protests, it’s even more obvious how little transmission has to do with individual behavior—the majority of Covid-19 transmissions occur in situations people didn’t choose to be in. Many infections are driven simply by where a patient lives: the most common site of transmission is within people’s homes, which is one of many reasons case numbers are higher in poorer, densely-packed households—often in neighborhoods that have been systematically starved of resources for decades. Rates are also incredibly high among homeless populations and within nursing homes. Essential workplaces with substandard protections and inadequate sick leave policies also put workers at risk, with major outbreaks emerging among workers in fields like meatpacking, sanitation and public transit. In some cases, employers are alleged to have contributed toward infection rates: several warehouse workers have sued Amazon over negligent safety measures pertaining to the virus.

In short, the vast majority of Covid-19 transmissions happen between people who were somehow compelled to spend long stretches of time with infected people: their family members or fellow inhabitants of nursing homes, homeless encampments or shelters; their fellow inmates; or other workers on the job. In many such cases, the conditions for transmission were laid by political decisions: the United States boasts more aggressive and expansive incarceration than any country on Earth, our lack of comprehensive and affordable housing policies have led to greater homelessness than peer countries, and our lack of union power has left workers less equipped to fight for safety protections and sick leave.

As such, widespread shaming on social media of individual behaviors like not wearing masks while running outdoors, or walking on a beach, have largely overemphasized the risk of transmission between passing strangers. While no activity is risk-free, individuals are perfectly capable of judging risk and modulating behavior accordingly, particularly if they have sensible guidance. But as epidemiological evidence about relative risks has mounted, public health messaging has been slow to evolve. Certain types of transmission appear to be quite rare: In one study of more than 7,300 cases in China, just one was connected to outdoor transmission. Touching infected surfaces likewise seems less dangerous than once feared.

These developments call for a reorientation of how we think about how risk is imposed on others, and how we navigate it for ourselves. As Harvard epidemiologist Julia Marcus told me, “People are making decisions every day about risk. And right now they're doing it without a complete picture of the relative risks of different activities that they may be engaging in. And now that we've realized this is going to go on for a really long time, we have to accept that most people can't sustain zero social contact.” If social distancing guidelines have thus far been analogous to abstinence-only education, Marcus argued, it’s time to move toward harm-reduction and teach people to make choices safely.

As the wave of protests shows, many Americans have determined that the moderate infection risk is exceeded by the risks imposed by the over-policing, systemic racism and poverty that stand at the center of the uprisings. The epidemiological evidence appears to be on their side.

]]>Natalie ShureFri, 05 Jun 2020 21:55:00 +0000In Minneapolis, Cops Were Kicked Out of Schools. Cities in 7 Other States Could Soon Follow Suit.http://inthesetimes.com/article/22577/minneapolis-police-free-schools-divestment-protests-chicago-new-york-cops/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22577/minneapolis-police-free-schools-divestment-protests-chicago-new-york-cops/Activists around the country have intensified calls for police-free schools following the Minneapolis Board of Education’s decision on June 2 to terminate its contract with the city’s police department. The school board's announcement came in the midst of the nationwide protests in response to the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. The move was celebrated widely on social media, with organizers pointing to the victory as a model for other school districts to follow.

There is a visible ripple effect taking place. The hashtag #PoliceFreeSchools has been trending on social media, with a number of activists, organizations, students and educators demanding that their cities follow Minneapolis’ lead. And national groups like the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and Scholars for Black Lives have launched campaigns to get schools, colleges and universities to cut ties with the police. “Now more than ever, as we envision anew schools, colleges, and universities in what will follow the Covid-19 pandemic, we believe the discontinuation of contractual relationships between local police organizations and educational institutions is a moral imperative,” an open letter on Wednesday from Scholars For Black Lives said.

But the real action has been on the local level. Ahead of the Minneapolis vote, school board member Josh Pauly told the Huffington Post that school district representatives in “Arizona, North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Oregon, New York and Illinois” reached out to ask for support on drafting similar proposals. This is already yielding results; on Thursday, for instance, the superintendent of the Portland, Ore., public schools announced that he was “discontinuing the regular presence of school resource officers," adding, "we need to re-examine our relationship with the [Portland Police Bureau].”

Activists want to make sure this momentum continues. Shortly after Minneapolis’ decision, the Urban Youth Collaborative, a youth organization that has been working on ending the school-to-prison pipeline in New York for over a decade, called on Mayor Bill de Blasio to follow Minneapolis’ lead. “Now is the time for New York City to take the same action, along with other schools around the country,” the group said in a press statement. Over the past four days, IntegrateNYC, a youth group working to integrate New York City classrooms, has collected 16,000 signatures in a petition calling on Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York City Board of Education to defund the police and remove them from public schools.

Similar drives have been launched in Phoenix, Seattle and Oakland, while members of the Denver school board and the superintendent of the Denver Public Schools announced on Tuesday that they would begin a critical conversation around schools and police.

In addition, the Chicago Teachers Union, students, and a number of community organizations started a campaign on Wednesday demanding that the Board of Education and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) end its $33 million-a-year contract with the Chicago Police Department and reinvest in school resources. (The contract was approved in 2019; in comparison, the overall 2019 CPS budget allocated $2.5 million to hire 30 school nurses and $3.5 million to hire 35 social workers in a school district that serves over 355,000 students, making it the third-largest in the United States.)

Pointing to the precedent Minneapolis just set, the coalition wrote, “What we’re asking for is not just reasonable and responsible, but entirely possible.” The campaign has been endorsed by a number of organizations including Students Strike Back, Assata’s Daughters and the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council.

Derrianna Ford, 16, spoke in front of the Chicago Board of Education in the summer of 2019 to oppose the police contract but said students’ concerns weren’t heard. “We were calling on this money to be spent on nurses because we are so understaffed. We were asking for counselors,” she said in an interview this week.

Derrianna, who just finished her junior year at Mather High School in Chicago’s North Side, said her school is overcrowded and under-resourced, with one nurse coming in on Tuesday and Thursday mornings to serve nearly 1,500 students. “I’m going into senior year next year and I’ve never met my counselor. Never,” she said.

Derrianna described an environment of fear among the student body when it comes to “school resource officers,” whom, she said, teachers will call upon to handle minor transgressions like students refusing to do their work or putting their heads on their desks.“It’s like [teachers] use them as a weapon or something,” she said.

Derrianna started organizing with Voices of Youth in Chicago Education (VOYCE), a youth-led organizing alliance for education and racial justice, about two years ago, though the group has been organizing to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline in Chicago schools for much longer.

“VOYCE has been working on this from the start and we are not quite where [Minneapolis is] at, but we will keep pushing and keep fighting until we’re there,” Derrianna said. She’s been out protesting peacefully every day and mentioned that VOYCE is continuing to organize around safe learning environments. The Minneapolis school board’s decision, she believes, has put more pressure on Chicago Public Schools to consider students’ demand to rid the city’s campuses of its police presence in the future. “Minneapolis really showed that it’s possible. All we have to do is keep fighting,” she said. “They see it coming.”

]]>Indigo OlivierFri, 05 Jun 2020 12:30:00 +0000Trump’s Answer to Structural Racism? Police State Fascism.http://inthesetimes.com/article/22576/trump-racism-police-state-fascism-george-floyd-protests/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22576/trump-racism-police-state-fascism-george-floyd-protests/The confluence of a ferociously deadly pandemic, mass unemployment, the police murder of George Floyd and surging authoritarianism is plunging the United States into chaos.

More than 100,000 Americans have died and over 40 million have been rendered jobless by the coronavirus crisis. The virus of racism runs far deeper, an endemic feature of American society for which there is no quarantine, no single vaccine.

The Trump administration’s fascistic response to the protests over Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis police threatens to divert attention from a long-deferred conversation about systemic racism to the president’s militaristic response. But these issues are thoroughly intertwined. As actor George Takei commented, “Trump is holding a knee on the neck of American Democracy, and the GOP is the three cops just watching it happen while protecting him.”

Before our eyes, we are witnessing the unraveling of a nation’s myths of itself. What began as a vicious and racist police murder of George Floyd has now erupted into society-wide upheaval over unaccountable policing, racism, and an increasingly authoritarian Trump administration.

On Monday, June 1, we saw another police slaying of a black man: Louisville, Kentucky police shot and killed David McAtee, a beloved business owner who was protesting the police killing of Breonna Taylor. Later that day, Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer fired the city’s police chief. On Tuesday, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance fired cops who brutally yanked an African-American college couple from their car and struck them with a taser gun. In cities across the country, police departments have violently suppressed peaceful protesters, egged on by the president.

Yet none of this police brutality appears to be enough for Trump, who blasted governors for being “weak,” insisting they must “dominate” protesters who are rising up to decry police violence. In a June 1 speech, Trump threatened a federal military crackdown on dissent: "If a city or state refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents, then I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them."

In his call with governors that same day, Trump said the protests are “like a movement, and it’s a movement that if you don’t put it down, it’ll get worse and worse, this is like Occupy Wall Street.” To put down this nationwide movement of millions calling for an end to police racism and brutality, Trump is promising to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to override Posse Comitatus Act restrictions on using the military for domestic law enforcement.

Trump and his Secretary of Defense Mark Esper insist on “dominating” what they call “the battlespace” and crushing dissent. This essentially amounts to an act of war on American civilians, says Ray Mabus, Navy secretary under former President Barack Obama: “When his secretary of defense says that they have to ‘dominate the battlespace’ it means equating Americans to an enemy and waging war on your own citizens.”

The ACLU posits that Trump may have violated international law by having protesters tear-gassed to make way for his photo-op: “This appears to be grossly unjustified use of a chemical weapon on protesters and raises serious human rights concerns under international law.”

After decades of creeping omens and warning signs, under Trump, it appears that fascism has arrived in America. When a president threatens a military crackdown on peaceful protesters, that’s unmistakable fascism—precisely the kind that politicians in both U.S. parties have decried as “authoritarianism” in other countries (particularly when they are socialist or communist-led). When police and National Guard tanks roll through a Minneapolis neighborhood, with police screaming at residents to “get inside now,” and threatening to “light ‘em up,” firing paintballs at people standing on their front stoop, that’s fascism. When a president claims he has “absolute power,” and routinely attacks media and journalists—a key pillar of democracy—as “fake,” that’s fascism.

Fascism is defined by Webster’s New World Dictionary as “a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized governmental control, belligerent nationalism, racism, and militarism.”

By this popular definition, we are about two-thirds of the way to this un-promised land of political repression. Today’s melding of heightened presidential powers (expanded significantly under Obama), monopolistic levels of corporate power, a heavily militarized and unaccountable police state, and Trump’s authoritarian lurch together imperil the “American experiment.”

This fascist turn may be diluted by popular anti-fascist action, and the remaining shreds of U.S. democracy—but it is now insinuating itself firmly into the state. America’s police state has grown dramatically over the past 50 years since the Nixon administration’s expansion of militarized policing. Surveillance, intimidation and brutality against dissent have been increasingly prominent since the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s.

For black and brown people, racism-fueled policing has been here all along—“stamped from the beginning,” as author and scholar Ibram X. Kendi puts it in his bestselling book of that title. Now, many white Americans are getting an acrid taste of this toxic deadly force.

In a 2014 interview, renowned scholar Angela Davis noted, “There is an unbroken line of police violence in the US that takes us all the way back to the days of slavery.”

Not lost in this moment is the profound irony of Trump backing the gun-wielding, mostly white “liberate” gatherings, which saw attendees thumbing their noses at shelter-in-place rules aimed at stemming the deadly pandemic. Just a month ago, police gently abided these armed assemblies that violated public health orders, and Trump and other right-wingers celebrated their First and Second Amendment rights.

Now, when diverse unarmed folks assemble peacefully to demand an end to racism and police brutality, these rights seem to have evaporated. As Bill Madden tweeted, “In case you missed it, fascism has arrived in America: Trump ordered the police to tear gas, and shoot with rubber bullets peaceful protesters near the White House—so he could have a photo-op holding a bible.”

Trump’s assault on civil liberties is startling even to veterans of presidential authoritarianism such as Carl Bernstein, co-author of “All the President’s Men,” who remarked: “We have now watched an armed attack, instigated by the president of the United States, on peaceful, law-abiding demonstrators exercising their Constitutional rights. All of Trump’s actions and words have etched today as a grim moment in American history.”

In 2009, writer Gore Vidal predicted the rise of American authoritarianism, observing the country was, already then, “rotting away at a funereal pace. We’ll have a military dictatorship fairly soon.” That “soon” now appears to be upon us.

This incremental coup is not complete, of course, and there is time to bring it to a halt. The answer is strategic resistance, such as we are seeing with the spread of mass demonstrations across all 50 states. Even as Trump clamps down with more police militarism, people are rising up and resisting.

This resistance is not only essential—it is an expression of what America is supposed to be about. As Trump and the police state crush the myth of “American exceptionalism,” the surging anti-racist movements offer an opportunity to rectify the obscenely unequal and unjust realities of American life.

]]>Christopher D. CookThu, 04 Jun 2020 22:23:00 +0000Tear Gas Is Banned in International Warfare––Why Are Police Using It On U.S. Civilians?http://inthesetimes.com/article/22575/tear-gas-George-Floyd-Protest-War-Crimes-Black-Lives-Matter/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22575/tear-gas-George-Floyd-Protest-War-Crimes-Black-Lives-Matter/On June 2, President Trump threatened to deploy military troops against Americans in response to nationwide protests after the recent murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Trump’s suggestion to use military force against U.S. civilians shocked many—but in fact police already have been using a weapon banned in international warfare against protesters: tear gas.

Across the country, police officers have tear-gassed protesters in attempts to clear out crowds. While U.S. officials have a history of using tear gas as a “riot control agent” (defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as “chemical compounds that temporarily make people unable to function by causing irritation to the eyes, mouth, throat, lungs and skin”), tear gas was banned in international warfare through the Chemical Weapons Convention in 1997.

The Convention is a treaty that 193 nation-states are party to through the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) headquartered in the Netherlands. The treaty’s purpose was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction in international warfare by prohibiting the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, defined by the OPCW as a “chemical used to cause intentional death or harm through its toxic properties.” Tear gas irritates the respiratory system, skin and eyes, which can lead to loss of eyesight and breathing problems, classifying it as a chemical weapon if used to intentionally cause harm or death (such as when it was used during World War I).

Under Article II Section 9 of the treaty, however, chemical agents used for “domestic riot control purposes” by law enforcement are not prohibited. Because U.S. law enforcement claims to use tear gas as a method to clear crowds, rather than to cause “intentional death or harm,” it has been used widely by police officers across the country.

Aside from international regulations that limit tear gas use in warfare, the United States has no regulations on the use of tear gas domestically, nor does it require training for officers who do use it.

The CDC reports that “prolonged exposure [to tear gas], especially in an enclosed area, may lead to long-term effects such as eye problems including scarring, glaucoma and cataracts, and may possibly cause breathing problems such as asthma.” ProPublica also reports that the chemical may make people “more susceptible to contracting influenza, pneumonia and other illnesses.”

Despite these risks, on Monday night federal law enforcement officers tear-gassed peaceful protesters in front of a church in Washington, D.C., to make way for the president’s photo-op. The White House has since claimed that a “pepper irritant” was used rather than tear gas; yet the CDC still defines the irritant as a type of tear gas because of the physical damage it can cause. As we enter day 10 of protests against police violence, and despite first-amendment rights to peacefully gather, tear gas continues to be used on protesters.

]]>Janea WilsonThu, 04 Jun 2020 19:29:00 +0000One Weird Trick to Slash Your City’s Police Budget Right Nowhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22574/police-budget-george-floyd-covid-19-los-angeles-protests/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22574/police-budget-george-floyd-covid-19-los-angeles-protests/Among the many good ideas for changing the tendency of U.S. police to brutalize people and ruin lives, one stands out as the most direct: Having fewer police. We’ve heard much about how politically difficult it can be for elected officials to cut police department budgets. Well, guess what: it just so happens that every city in America is now in the midst of a historic budget crisis. There’s never been an easier time to defund the cops!

There are a host of policy changes that can help make it less likely that citizens will be the subject of abuse from the police. You can impose stricter rules about use of force; you can establish stronger civilian review boards to hold police accountable; you can change provisions in police union contracts that protect bad officers from oversight. All of these things are fine objectives. But nothing will do more to stop police violence than simply giving police departments less money so that there will be fewer police on the streets.

When we have things, they will be used. This is the basic argument against having a gun in your home—statistics show you are more likely to be shot if you have one. If you do not have a gun, you will not shoot yourself with that gun, and nobody else will shoot you with it. Likewise with police. Just as Americans are over-incarcerated, so too are they over-policed. The entire idea that more police equals more public safety has always been a myth, and the protests in the streets of America today are proof of how deadly that myth has been. In fact, there is evidence that less aggressive policing leads to less major crime.

The fact that cutting police department budgets can be a strong net good for social justice is not a new insight. Activists across the country have long recognized this, and many of them are organizing to rein in police budgets right this moment. They are calling to cut police budgets in Philadelphia. They are calling to cut police budgets in Los Angeles. They are calling to cut police budgets in New York City. They are calling to cut police budgets in Chicago. Although there is more serious political momentum now than ever before to reduce police funding—in L.A., it is actually going to happen—it must also be noted that even after many decades of prominent police killings and protests, state and local spending on police has tripled over the past 40 years.

Even in Democratic-controlled cities, modern history has been one of police departments accumulating more funding and power, rather than the opposite. Even New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, who ran as a police reformer, has found himself transformed into a groveling police apologist six years into the job. The most practical question at hand today is: How do we give these cowed state and local politicians the will to cut police budgets, when they all seem terrified the Big Bad Police Men will be angry with them?

It is important that the most spineless and craven Democratic city leaders in America understand that right now, at this very moment, is, without exaggeration, the easiest time in history for them to cut police budgets. That is true not only because of the thousands of people in the streets of their cities crying out for fundamental change, but also for a much simpler reason: The coronavirus shutdowns, the subsequent freeze of economic activity, and the utter failure of Congress to pass an adequate economic rescue package means that virtually every city and state government in the country is now in the midst of a sudden, unprecedented budget crisis.

An unpredictable national catastrophe and our broken federal government response are forcing cities to cut billions of dollars from their budgets at the very same time that gargantuan citizen protests are demanding the defunding of police. The entire thing is really being set up on a tee here. A child could figure this one out. Even Bill de Blasio could, on a good day.

Cut the police budget to solve the budget crisis. If a mayor is too scared to admit that they are doing it because cops are bad, they can just blame the coronavirus. Problem solved. Everyone wins! City budgets can be balanced, citizens will be at lower risk of having their lives upended by racist policing, and politicians will be able to momentarily wriggle out of a tough spot without having to slash other, legitimately more important city services as deeply as they would have otherwise.

There is something quite satisfying in the idea of jiu-jitsuing Mitch McConnell’s stubborn unwillingness to save state and local governments into a mass defunding of police departments. This is how you use Republican hatred of all public services in service of the public.

]]>Hamilton NolanThu, 04 Jun 2020 16:16:00 +0000The “Outside Agitator” Is a Myth Used to Weaken Protest Movementshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22572/racial-justice-protests-Minneapolis-outside-agitator-myth/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22572/racial-justice-protests-Minneapolis-outside-agitator-myth/This piece was first published at Jacobin.

Over the last few days, we’ve seen a national uprising against racism and police brutality. In response, the first instinct of the defenders of the status quo was to unite behind an old talking point: the uprising was carried out by “outside agitators” from beyond the communities where the protests took place. It’s a trope that should be immediately recognized as both false and designed to downplay and write off the widespread anger that led to these rebellions.

President Donald Trump, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, and Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey have all blamed out-of-state agitators for the “riots.” Mainstream media soon echoed this narrative. NBC and the Hill were among the outlets reporting St. Paul mayor Melvin Carter saying, “Every single person we arrested last night, I’m told, was from out of state.”

As it turns out, an investigation by KARE 11, an NBC-affiliated television station in Minneapolis, states that “local jail records show the vast majority of those arrested for rioting, unlawful assembly, and burglary are Minnesotans.” The data, taken from the Hennepin County Jail roster, shows that “of thirty-six cases, about 86 percent of those arrested [from May 29 to May 30] listed Minnesota as their address”—four times more than the 20 percent Gov. Walz estimated at a press conference on Saturday morning. Mayor Carter subsequently retracted the incorrect statement, blaming inaccurate information during a police briefing.

Why does this matter? The “outside agitator” trope is today often accompanied by a tirade against “white anarchists” or “Antifa” carrying out the rebellion — while people of color don’t. This is an attempt to isolate and weaken protesters from each other, to make the “good” protesters distrustful and paranoid about “infiltration” by white radicals. (Radicals of color, meanwhile, are nowhere to be found.) Fostering distrust among developing coalitions is a quick and easy way to ensure their swift demise.

These accusations have long popped up in response to civil rights struggles. In 1965, the White Citizens’ Council posted over two hundred billboards throughout the South attempting to discredit Martin Luther King Jr by associating him with communism. One, which shows a photo of King attending a 1957 event at the Highlander Folk School, a key training site for many civil rights activists, is titled “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.” On the billboard, a giant, cartoonish arrow points directly to King.

Red-baiting accompanied King wherever he went in the South. In 1965, just before the brutal police crackdown of civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama, Dallas County sheriff Jim Clark implied King was an outsider agitator and estimated the march was “possibly made up of one-fourth communists and one-half pro-communists.”

For Clark and scores of white racists throughout the South, the paternalistic idea was that “our Negroes” would never engage in such protests, as they were largely content but were being stirred up by outside troublemakers. Acknowledging that enormous numbers of local African Americans were deeply angry at the status quo and ready to revolt would have meant acknowledging that the status quo was rotten.

Richard Seymour wrote in 2014, in response to the term being employed by both liberals and reactionaries during the Ferguson uprising, “The ‘outside agitator’ line reeks of good old boy vigilantism, the commingling of race-baiting and red-baiting that was typical of Southern counterrevolution in the dying days of Jim Crow.”

Segregationists sought to preserve Jim Crow law by branding black radicals as communists, condemning black activists to destructive investigations from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and elsewhere. As Paul Heideman states, “The anticommunist purges of the late 1940s and early 1950s dealt a hammer blow to the movement for racial equality.” A reactionary crusade against communists, aided and abetted by liberal Democrats and premised in many ways in the myth of the outside agitator radical being responsible for civil rights unrest, successfully demolished an emerging coalition between left-led workers’ unions and civil rights activists.

In 2020, the phrase, and these tactics, have once again reared their ugly head. The myth of “outside agitators” is being simultaneously weaponized by conservatives and liberals to demean and intimidate protesters. We shouldn’t let them — it’s an accusation designed to downplay the widespread anger so many are feeling and acting on in this country.

King warned us, “We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools.”

Don’t fall for defenders of the status quo continuing to blame “outside agitators” for the rebellions sweeping the country right now — they want us to perish together as fools.

In These Times is proud to feature content from Jacobin, a print quarterly that offers socialist perspectives on politics and economics. Support Jacobin and buy a subscription for just $29.95.

]]>Glenn HoulihanWed, 03 Jun 2020 19:45:00 +0000Democratic Leaders’ Shamefully Tepid Response to Trump’s Threat of Military Crackdown on Protestshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22570/pelosis-shamefully-tepid-response-to-trumps-threat-to-unleash-the-military/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22570/pelosis-shamefully-tepid-response-to-trumps-threat-to-unleash-the-military/At a June 1 press conference, President Trump declared war against the Black-led uprisings taking place across the country by calling on the deployment of U.S. troops to American cities. “War”—a term typically reserved as metaphor or figure of speech—in this context increasingly appears to be a literal act taken by the President of the United States.

Trump said he would deploy the U.S. military to any city or state that “refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents,” and he declared that he was dispatching “thousands and thousands of heavily armed soldiers, military personnel, and law enforcement officers” to Washington, DC. The remarks, delivered in front of a church where, moments ago, the streets had been violently cleared by the National Guard, sent a clear message to Trump’s white supremacist base that he plans to respond with brute—and potentially lethal—force to nationwide rebellions that were touched off by the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Minneaolis police. His remarks followed Trump's May 28 tweet, in which he declared, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” which the ACLU said amounts to “directing the National Guard to murder protesters.”

This is a moment that calls for clear opposition and moral outrage. But instead, hours after this shocking speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.), the most powerful Democrats in the country, issued a mealy-mouthed, platitude-heavy statement that is worth reading in its entirety:

Across our country, Americans are protesting for an end to the pattern of racial injustice and brutality we saw most recently in the murder of George Floyd.

Yet, at a time when our country cries out for unification, this President is ripping it apart. Tear-gassing peaceful protestors without provocation just so that the President could pose for photos outside a church dishonors every value that faith teaches us.

We call upon the President, law enforcement and all entrusted with responsibility to respect the dignity and rights of all Americans. Together, we must insist on the truth that America must do much more to live up to its promise: the promise of liberty and justice for all, which so many have sacrificed for – from Dr. King to John Lewis to peaceful protestors on the streets today.

At this challenging time, our nation needs real leadership. The President’s continued fanning of the flames of discord, bigotry and violence is cowardly, weak and dangerous.

Nowhere in this statement do Pelosi or Schumer say unequivocally that they oppose Trump’s threat to deploy the U.S. military against Black people in the United States. They give a name check to “racial injustice and brutality,” but they do not even name the police as the purveyors of this brutality. They say our country “cries out for unification,” but demonstrators aren’t calling for "unification," whatever that means: They are angry and are forcefully demanding a change to a status quo that is killing Black people. By praising the “peaceful protesters on the streets today,” Pelosi and Schumer are implicitly creating a dichotomy between good and bad protesters for the purpose of criticizing the latter—a dichotomy that Trump himself has embraced and one central to the logic behind his military escalation.

But it’s what they didn’t mention that is most alarming. Nowhere do Pelosi and Schumer pledge that they will stop the military from enacting Trump’s apparent fever dream of a race war. Nowhere do they say that Democrats will fight to make sure that American armed forces aren’t killing people in the streets. Nowhere do they condemn the ongoing police crackdowns and collaborations with white militias, curfews or national guard deployments already terrorizing U.S. streets: all forms of collective punishment at exactly the moment Black Americans are demanding justice.

The closest either comes to an actual condemnation is a tweet thread from Schumer specifically condemning "federal officers" for firing tear gas on protesters in D.C. but only calling for an Inspector General to launch an “investigation into how the military is being used.” He goes on to declare, "The admin is using the military as a tool to intimidate citizens. Sec. Esper & General Milley should not allow the US Armed Forces to come anywhere near these ugly stunts." Schumer's wording is ambiguous, and it is not immediately clear whether he is saying Trump should not deploy the military. In the very next line, he merely calls for an investigation: "The Department of Defense Inspector General must launch an investigation into how the military is being used."

However ambiguous Schumer's wording may be, Pelosi's further remarks were outright baffling. In a follow-up presser, Pelosi held up a bible in response to Trump doing the same, rambling about Trump having “the responsibility to heal.” Again, she offers no specific proposals to meet the demands of the Black Lives Matter movement—or even to oppose Trump’s call for military occupation of American cities.

While Trump has escalated and emboldened the police who overwhelmingly support him, it’s important to note that the Black Lives Matter movement began under a Demcoratic president, Barack Obama, and its major early uprisings—from Ferguson to Baltimore to Minneapolis—happened under Democratic mayors and Democratic-appointed police chiefs. Democrats have had a chance since Black Lives Matter began in earnest in August of 2014 to be the party of the movement—to demand the defunding of police and slashing of prison populations, and to call for long overdue reparations for Black Americans. But instead, what Democratic leadership has offered is a series of never-ending exploratory committees, toothless DOJ investigations, photo-ops, platitudes about “healing” and “unity” and half measures like increased training (which does nothing more than give more money to the police and is often administered by abusers themselves) and deploying body cameras (which have not stamped out the scourge of police violence.)

Imagine if Demcoratic Party leadership announced a bold plan for Black America reflecting the realdemands of the Black Lives Matter movement: meaningfully diviesting from police and prisons and redirecting resources into social programs for black communities; undermining police power rather than continuing to fund it alongside cosmetic “reforms.”

There is a direct line between Pelosi and Schumer’s failure to demand an immediate end to Trump’s war on Black people and their failure to oppose Trump’s wars around the world. Pelosi and Schumer have voted in favor of every single mammoth war budget under Trump, and have consistently failed to muster a real opposition to the many horrific wars he is waging around the world. From Yemen to Afghanistan to Venezuela to Trump’s escalation towards the Palestinians, Democratic leadership has consistently either aided or ignored Trump’s belocosity. Pelosi has spent the past few months partnering with GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell to take on progressives in her own party to expand Patriot Act surveillance powers for Trump. It’s predictable then, that when the President turns his imperial bludgeon on his own—effectively occupied—Black population, they are equally useless.

Trump’s racist rhetoric and appeals to martial law are a radical escalation, and need to be met with a forceful response. He has given the green light to white militias, police and military forces to violently menace the streets. This country desperately needs a real opposition party—one that can read the urgency of the moment and respond with concrete policy proposals and unequivocal support for Black lives, not more squishy rhetoric about “unity” and “healing” but actionable, meaningful plans for meeting the demands of those crying out on the streets of American cities.

]]>Sarah Lazare and Adam JohnsonTue, 02 Jun 2020 23:46:00 +0000The Focus on Looting Shows How Our Systems of Power Value Capital Over Human Liveshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22559/george-floyd-looting-protest-police-killing-racism-capitalism/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22559/george-floyd-looting-protest-police-killing-racism-capitalism/As it is with any season of protest, nothing brings out the murderous authoritarianism in the ruling class quite like the sight of disobedience by ordinary black people. It comes if you rally by the thousands to deem their authority illegitimate. If you call for an end to a hailstorm of brutality. Or bring chaos upon property in the shadow of yet another destroyed black life.

Since the public murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, protests have swept cities across the country. Hundreds of thousands have risen to demand justice for Floyd, and to voice their exhaustion with a system of punishment that tyrannizes poor communities of color. Predictably, the outrage has turned combustible, and property has not been spared in the unrest’s many explosions. Shelves licked clean at Target and Sephora. An AutoZone set ablaze while its spokesperson trembles with horror at the “disturbing and tragic events.” By this, he apparently means a few charred buildings, but not the man whose neck was crushed by an agent of the state. Eventually, Minneapolis’s third police precinct was evacuated before protesters lit the building and the night sky up in flames.

In response, certain corners of the media and political ecosystem have been in complete meltdown. None more so than the White House, with President Trump sending a deranged tweet, warning the “THUGS” of Minneapolis that “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The “THUGS” here are those who strip food and televisions from the shelves of lifeless stores, but not a police department with a record of horrific cruelty against actual living humans, or the prosecutors, like now Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who looked the other way. We should be clear about what Trump is promising here: That an extrajudicial death sentence is a fitting punishment for petty theft. That property is so sacred that people ought to be gunned down for it in what is, quite plainly, a call for public lynchings.

But Trump’s words also shine useful daylight on the depraved tendencies of the nation's ruling class, who place human life in the same category as inanimate objects.

The principal stretches back to America's anti-democratic founding. Popular control, James Madison famously wrote, must be stopped in order “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” The government’s job was to act as a guardian to protect such a plainly unfair distribution of wealth, property, and power, because those who “labour under all the hardships of life” would “secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.” That principle would come to life in the mid-19th century when, as historian Sam Mitrani has written, modern policing was “created by the ruling class to control working-class and poor people, not help them.” In the South, the slave empire had its patrols. And in the North, the titans of wage-labor capitalism recruited police to discipline an unruly working-class, who were indeed organizing “for a more equal distribution” of the nation’s “blessings.”

“Their basic job,” Mitrani writes, is “to enforce order among those with the most reason to resent the system.” In other words, the poor and working-class black people who are being hammered by multiple crises all at once.

On one side is a rampaging pandemic, with nearly 23,000 black Americans dead from Covid-19. As scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, “coronavirus has scythed its way through black communities, highlighting and accelerating the ingrained social inequities that have made African-Americans the most vulnerable to the disease.” On the other side is the relentless and devastating force of racism and racial hierarchy itself, which undergirds every major political, economic and social institution in the country. Our (often for-profit) punishment system and the police who serve as its shock troops are only the most dramatic example. Desperate for better and safer lives, and with the nation’s political leaders flailing around hopelessly, people have been driven into the streets, and thus right into the buzzsaw of the pandemic.

In the devastating collision of these crises, the priorities of the ruling class have come into sharp focus. White House economics adviser Kevin Hassett tells CNN that “Our human capital stock is ready to get back to work,” a clear window into elite opinion on the lives of working people, who are transformed into raw economic material themselves, whose lives can be sacrificed at the temple of profit. George Floyd was arrested and killed for alleged forgery, a crime of poverty punishable by death. Destroyed like faulty machinery. Capitalism, and its many enforcement arms, can obliterate you if you are found in violation of the service of profit.

In Michigan, white protesters stormed the capital last month, some armed to the teeth, demanding a “reopening” of the economy. They asked for nothing but a return to their status quo and faced no challenge from police, whose entire motive is upholding that status quo. In the more recent unrest, peaceful protesters have been calling for radical changes in the American fabric, and have been met by waves of unprovoked police violence. That the first type of protest would be met by soft acceptance, and the second by brutal suppression reveals a nation desperate, as author and poet Hanif Abdurraqib writes, to “return to normal—howling with grief, soaked in blood.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. summed up the moral horror of America’s “normal” in his 1967 “Beyond Vietnam” speech, when he condemned our “thing-oriented society” where “machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people.” This quote is often shared as if it were an abstract or squishy moral assessment about the shallowness of American culture. But it’s actually a serious examination of the country’s basic economic priorities, in which people and things that are not living at all share the same social footing. King did not mince words: this line of thinking had to be overthrown in order to “conquer” the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” The reaction to today’s uprisings only confirms that it still needs to be vanquished.

Protesters have not lost legitimacy because they lack grace or decorum or break with the social contract. Rather, they have gained their footing by pointing to the cruel underpinnings of our current political order. When Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin dug his knee into George Floyd’s neck, he did so with the power to use lethal force in the state’s name. In this instance, it was to discipline a member of the most despised group in the nation’s history. A group with countless justifiable grievances against the United States—and the cruel priorities of American capitalism.

]]>Eli DayMon, 01 Jun 2020 21:35:00 +0000How to Make the Left More Attractivehttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22556/how-to-make-the-left-more-attractive/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22556/how-to-make-the-left-more-attractive/Maximillian AlvarezMon, 01 Jun 2020 13:15:00 +0000How to Save the Restaurant Workforce From Being Casualties of The Covid-19 Crisishttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22555/restaurant-workforce-covid-19-coronavirus/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22555/restaurant-workforce-covid-19-coronavirus/As the Covid-19 pandemic has swept through cities across the country, restaurants have been forced to shut down indefinitely—or slashed their workforces and reduced their operations to threadbare delivery and take-out only services.

Saru Jayaraman, President of One Fair Wage, an advocacy group for restaurant workers and other tipped service employees (including Uber and Doordash drivers, manicurists and car wash workers) hopes the economic turmoil might lead to a much-needed reset for the industry.

One Fair Wage, which grew out of the national labor advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, envisions a sustainable post-pandemic business model. It starts with dismantling the subminimum wage system, which allows employers to calculate the minimum wage for tipped workers at just a fraction of the normal minimum, as little as $2.13 per hour, leading to rampant wage theft. And with millions of households grappling with food insecurity, One Fair Wage is also piloting the “High Road Kitchens” project—a combination of mutual aid and community-based entrepreneurship, which offers a living wage to all workers and currently works with restaurants in California to feed low-wage workers in their local communities.

In These Times talked to Jayaraman about how the pandemic could change restaurant work over the long term. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

MC: How does the pandemic underscore the issues that One Fair Wage has been advocating around for years?

The pandemic put our work on speed because it literally just made our point for us: it showed America why no one should ever have been making less than a minimum wage to begin with. After all, remember that the minimum wage in the United States emerged from the last Great Depression, and at that time tipped workers were excluded [from unemployment benefits and federal safety net programs meant for industrial workers]. Incarcerated workers, gig workers, people with disabilities were excluded. That was supposed to be the moment when people [decided] going forward, no one is going to get less than this minimum. But it wasn’t true for these workers. So with the pandemic, more than 10 million service sector workers have lost their jobs and are having real problems accessing unemployment insurance or are getting unemployment insurance [based] on a total miscalculation of their income, because of the messiness of living off of tips. We’re hearing this from a lot of women who are single mothers. They’re going to apply for unemployment and the state unemployment insurance [office] is telling them [their tipped income] is too low to meet the minimum state threshold to qualify for unemployment insurance.

So tipped workers in America are up against two systems that come from the Great Depression and were built against them. One is the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers, which never worked and has been laid bare [by the pandemic] as a completely untenable situation. And two is unemployment. Now that states are reopening and restaurant workers are being forced to go back to work, not only are tipped workers facing the difficult choice between their livelihood and their life. On top of that, we’re facing a world in which tips have gone way down. People tip delivery and takeout [workers] maybe 10% of what they tip typically in a sit-down restaurant. So, all of that has made workers very angry, and we are organizing them and building up towards some really big direct action that’s coming up.

And it’s made employers, at least many independent restaurant owners, open their eyes. We’ve worked with Gov. Newsom to launch a program called High Road Kitchen in California that would provide cash grants to restaurants that commit to higher wage and greater equity going forward. And they take the money now and rehire workers and provide free meals to the community, and paid meals to anyone who can afford to pay for it. You would think all restaurant owners would be saying “don’t raise wages right now, we’re struggling.” But on the contrary, many restaurant owners, at least independent restaurant owners—the chains are not going to move on this—are saying “you know, this is precisely the time to raise wages. This is precisely the time to make changes because we’re all reinventing what restaurants are going to look. We’re having to redo our business models from scratch, we may as well incorporate something that is sustainable for our people, because it’s been made very clear that this sub-minimum wage never worked.”

My point is that all of those workers should get a full minimum wage from their employer in addition to safety protocols, because the tips are going to be so much less reliable going forward. They were never reliable to begin with. But they’re going to be even more insecure and unreliable.

MC: Overall what do you think the restaurant industry is going to look like, given that there are places that just aren’t going to be able to reopen. Do you think there might be more consolidation in the industry?

This is why we’re really pushing for solutions like High Road Kitchens, which is both about saving small businesses and bringing the industry in the right direction and hiring workers and feeding people all at the same time.

What I’m thinking about is a program that gets small businesses cash and commits them to higher wages—and helps them change their business models, and then also allows them to do feeding programs and rehire workers. And so it’s a multi-win, and it’s based on the philosophy and idea that if we’re going to be providing relief, let’s shape relief in a way that shapes the future. That’s what we should be doing as a country. If we know that the pandemic has laid bare inequities, then rather than providing blanket relief, especially to these big chains, that relief needs to be contingent on commitments to change.

We have two choices: Either we can go toward a much more horrific future where we force people to go back to work at two dollars an hour and there’s no tips, so they continue at basically Great Depression-era levels of poverty and starvation, plus they’re already in debt due to the last couple of months of not having income. That’s the horrific future. And then I think that the real future we need to fight for is one where we don’t go back until we get One Fair Wage and PPE and safety protocols. I don’t think there’s an in-between.

]]>Michelle ChenMon, 01 Jun 2020 11:39:00 +0000Amid Minneapolis Uprising, Anti-War Veterans Call On National Guard to Stand Downhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22554/anti-war-veterans-national-guard-george-floyd-police-minneapolis/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22554/anti-war-veterans-national-guard-george-floyd-police-minneapolis/The police killing of George Floyd, a Black man who said he couldn’t breathe as white officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck, has touched off an uprising in Minneapolis that left a police precinct ablaze Thursday night. After Minnesota governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, activated the National Guard, President Trump said on Twitter Friday morning, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” The ACLU said Trump’s remarks amount to “directing the National Guard to murder protesters."

With National Guard members now deployed in the streets of Minneapolis, a city with a history of police violence, U.S. military veterans of the so-called war on terror are calling on members of the National Guard to refuse orders to deploy against protesters. In an open letter to the Minnesota National Guard published Friday morning, members of About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly called Iraq Veterans Against the War), declared, “We urge you to have the courage to do the right thing. Refuse activation orders. No amount of property is worth a single human life. Are you really prepared to carry out the violence President Trump threatened against fellow Minnesotans? We ask that you stand up for Black lives by standing down.” The letter comes amid reports that union bus drivers are refusing to transport protesters to jail.

About Face is comprised of roughly 3,000 active duty military service members and veterans who have been in the U.S. military since September 11, 2001 and are organizing “to end a foreign policy of permanent war and the use of military weapons, tactics and values in communities across the country.” This is not the first time the organization, which openly supports G.I. resistance, has called for the National Guard to stand down from U.S. protests. In 2011, when then Governor Scott Walker threatened to activate the National Guard against Wisconsin workers protesting the governor’s anti-union measures, the organization called on the National Guard to “refuse and resist any mobilization orders.”

In These Times spoke with Brittany Ramos DeBarros, the organizing director of About Face, and a veteran of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, who helped draft the letter. “We’re conditioned to think once you sign the dotted line you are trapped, you have no choice, no agency, you should avoid any political speech,” she says. “I think that’s not true.”

Sarah Lazare: Can you explain how this call to action came together?

Brittany Ramos DeBarros: Obviously many of us in About Face speak from the place of being veterans and feel a responsibility because of the violence we participated in to speak up against that violence. I think folks get confused by the blurriness between the wars we’re speaking about and police violence in this country, but to anyone familiar to systems of militarization in this country, the connections are as clear as day.

Many of us came into the anti-war movement from economic justice and racial justice struggles. We were watching what was happening and unsure of how to plug in. When we saw the National Guard was called that was a very obvious opportunity to speak out. The importance of that became even more apparent once the president was brazenly tweeting, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” I literally saw that tweet and saw the Minnesota National Guard tweet about how they are being mobilized to help communities.

I think so many of us identify with that branding: We were told that we were going to help people, and ended up on the ground in a situation where you can barely process what you’re finding yourself to be part of. So we reached out to urge people to make the choice some of us had wished we had made.

Sarah: What message do you most want to send to members of the National Guard?

Brittany: I would want them to take away first and foremost that they do have a choice. From our perspective, we now have strong feelings about choices we wish we had made. We are not people to sit in a place of judgement. We are people who were deeply harmed by the system we participated in and were used by, but we also acknowledge the fact that we are responsible for our actions and our harm. In my heart, I long for people to have the courage to say, “I’m not going to participate in this legacy of the National Guard being used to squash righteous anger and righteous protest.”

In the military, we’re conditioned to think once you sign the dotted line you are trapped, you have no choice, no agency, you should avoid any political speech. I think that’s not true. In a moment like this, I just want people to stop what they are doing and understand they do have a choice and at the end of the day if they participate in something that turns into horrifying violence, it might be enough to tell other people I was doing what I had to, but that’s not going to be enough for you to live with. I wish more of us had known we could pause and say, “Do I really support this?”

Sarah: In this country there’s an economic draft in which poor people and people of color, many of whom are harmed by systems of exploitation and racist oppression, are targeted for military service. Do you think there’s a case to be made that the Minnesota National Guard should identify more with the protesters than with the police?

Brittany: Without question. How do we get folks to stop trying so hard to distance themselves from the people they’re most alike? In the United States, no one wants to say they’re poor. It’s a dirty word, but why isn’t “rich” a dirty word? We all tell ourselves we’re just one break away from being another class up. As the Reverend William Barber II says, it’s not left versus right, it’s top versus bottom, and right versus wrong.

The military feels the need to cloak the truth of what you’re asked to do in all these sexy commercials and titles and ceremonies. At the end of the day you’re getting all these benefits, getting this fanfare, because you’re saying you’re willing to kill when ordered. At the end of the day all of us are trained warriors first for a reason. One of the things it’s going to take for all of us to come together is to stop speaking in euphemisms. People get very offended when you say your job in the military is to kill on command. But that is the truth. The more we talk about it as serving the country, keeping people safe, liberating the Afghan people, etc., the more we deny the truth that can set us all free.

Sarah: About Face openly supports G.I. resistance. Do you see a link between refusing to deploy to unjust U.S. wars abroad and refusing to deploy against protesters in Minneapolis?

Brittany: Usually when we’re talking about connections across movements and systems, we talk about ways the war on terror replicates the initial wars to colonize this land, to exploit the original people of this land for economic gain. It’s interesting that you ask that question, because you can’t fully understand what it means to demilitarize our society unless you understand the roots of these wars go all the way back to the founding of this country. And when we see those roots, we see that the state violence we see today is made in the same image.

Sarah: I know you are a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. Is there anything from your own experience that feels relevant to the call for the National Guard to stand down?

Brittany: There are so many connections—too many to name. When I deployed to Afghanistan, I was still a true believer. When I was handed the mission on a piece of paper that said I’m going in service of the independence of the Afghan people, and I was supposed to help them build up their infrastructure, I believed it. It was while I was deployed I kept finding myself in my position where I was arguing with commanders. We were supposed to be doing a drawdown, but you had all these commanders who wanted to do missions so they could have higher mission counts. You had people looking for a fight, because they wanted that combat action badge. I saw the toxicness and racism and corruption of leadership. It became undeniable that even if that was the right mission, the military was not the right institution to achieve it.

Why do we think the military is a fix-all for all social problems that exist? How did that become a popularly accepted and passively accepted belief in our society—that you can throw the military at any complex problem and that’s the solution, when really the military is designed to be as lethal as possible?

Sarah: Is there anything you haven’t said yet that you want to get across?

Brittany: So many of us who joined About Face thought we were alone in our questioning of what we were participating in and thought we had no options. We found that not to be true. I want people to know they’re not alone.

]]>Sarah LazareFri, 29 May 2020 18:35:00 +0000There’s Room for Solidarity Between the Working Class and Progressive Professionalshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22551/theres-room-for-solidarity-between-the-working-class-and-progressive-profes/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22551/theres-room-for-solidarity-between-the-working-class-and-progressive-profes/Maximillian AlvarezThu, 28 May 2020 16:43:00 +0000Corporate Lawsuits Could Devastate Poor Countries Grappling with Covid-19http://inthesetimes.com/article/22549/corporate-lawsuits-covid-trade-deal-investor-state-dispute-settlement/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22549/corporate-lawsuits-covid-trade-deal-investor-state-dispute-settlement/The country was in freefall. Formerly middle class families were hawking their valuables on the street. After dark, the most desperate would search through garbage cans for food.

That was Argentina in 2002. In that dark hour, as Argentine officials scrambled to lessen the pain of a deep economic crisis on average citizens, the last thing they needed was a barrage of corporate lawsuits. But that’s what they got.

CMS Gas, for example, sued Argentina over a policy to freeze utility rates in local currency to protect consumers from runaway inflation. An international tribunal ordered the beleaguered government to pay the U.S. corporation $133 million. Other corporations settled for hundreds of millions more.

With countries scrambling to survive the global Covid-19 pandemic, many other countries could suffer Argentina’s fate. As economies falter, these policymakers now have to worry that their policy responses could make them the target of lawsuits.

“While the future remains uncertain,” states Aceris Law, an international arbitration law firm, “the response to the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to violate various protections provided in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and may bring rise to claims in the future by foreign investors.” The Washington, D.C.-based Aceris has won arbitration cases for numerous global corporations.

This is a field of law made lucrative by the proliferation of some 3,000 international investment treaties and trade agreements that give corporations the right to sue governments for hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars over policies they claim reduce the value of their foreign investments or their expected profits.

Through this “investor-state dispute settlement” system—better known by its acronym, ISDS—foreign investors can bypass domestic courts and bring claims directly to supranational arbitration tribunals.

A wealthy nation like the United States could conceivably face such claims over coronavirus-related policies. Imagine, for example, if the Trump administration were to force the South Korean-owned Hyundai factory in Alabama to make ventilators instead of cars. Hyundai could have standing to bring a case under the U.S.-Korea Trade Agreement.

In practice, however, few foreign firms would be eager to take a legal whack at the Trump administration. But developing country governments are at far greater risk. They tend to be the host rather than the home country for transnational corporations, and they are more politically vulnerable.

Members of these governments who want to help their residents now have to worry about investor lawsuits.

In Peru, for example, where families are clogging the roads as they flee the country’s crowded cities in fear of the virus, a proposed emergency measure would suspend toll collections. But there are already fears the government could face claims from foreign companies that operate the booths.

In Mexico, which is trying to control its power supply during the outbreak, the government is being threatened with arbitration by businesses in the European Union and Canada that want access to its energy markets.

Several other legal experts have warned that other emergency public health and economic policy responses to Covid-19—such as production mandates or exports bans for medical equipment, or reducing tariffs on medical device imports—may provoke retaliatory lawsuits from investors as well.

Poor countries in the crosshairs

The problem of corporations using ISDS to undermine legitimate public interest policies and regulations did not begin with the pandemic. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTAD, as of this year foreign investors have filed more than 1,000 claims. Because of lack of transparency, no one knows exactly how much governments have had to pay out.

At the Institute for Policy Studies, we’ve tallied up at least $72.4 billion in awards governments have been ordered to pay foreign investors in cases related to disputes over oil, gas and mining contracts. Extractive industries like mining make up a large share of total claims, often provoked by governments attempting to prevent environmental or public health damage from these activities, or ensure that more of the benefits stay in the home country.

Of the 34 cases we examined, one targeted Canada. All the rest were aimed at governments in the Global South. Extractive industries are demanding at least another $73 billion in 59 known pending cases, only five of which target rich country governments. Billions more are at stake in arbitration suits brought by corporations in the agri-business, finance, energy and other sectors, threatening to divert resources from managing pandemics and other urgent social needs.

Even before the current public health crisis, some countries had already become highly indebted to pay awards to corporations.

In 2019, Pakistan was ordered to pay $5 billion in an arbitration case over a gold and copper mine. This is almost as much as the recently negotiated $6 billion International Monetary Fund bailout loan to Pakistan, which is tied to deep economic austerity conditions.

Similarly, last year Ecuadorian organizations alleged that IMF loans, also tied with austerity measures that prompted huge protests, would be used to pay transnational corporations such as Chevron. The U.S. oil company was awarded $77 million in one investor-state suit against Ecuador and has another pending.

The new U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement—or the renegotiated “NAFTA 2.0"—made some progress in weakening investor-state dispute settlement, but the complex terms of the agreement leave Mexico still vulnerable to cases brought by U.S. and Canadian corporations.

The victims of the economic consequences of Covid-19 will not be foreign investors, but the poorest and most vulnerable around the world. When countries around the world are scrambling for resources to confront the Covid-19 pandemic, governments of the world should come together and agree to immediately suspend all investor-state cases and pending awards for corporations.

]]>Manuel Pérez-RochaThu, 28 May 2020 14:21:00 +0000Former Leaders of SDS, Meet the Current Members of DSAhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22546/response-nation-old-new-left-dsa-endorsement-criticism/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22546/response-nation-old-new-left-dsa-endorsement-criticism/As the Trump administration abdicates its responsibility for mass testing and contact tracing, tens of thousands of Americans—disproportionately working-class and people of color—are dying.

Meanwhile, America’s young people—loaded with college debt, inadequate health insurance and bleak job prospects—confront an increasingly dystopic future. The pandemic is, of course, not the only threat; climate change is poised to wreak unimaginable havoc. Young people rightly think that the free market has failed to provide solutions to both crises.

Inspired by Bernie Sanders, many millennials have turned to democratic socialism. In one of the most hopeful political developments in decades, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has seen its membership grow from 6,500 in 2014 to 66,000 today. (In These Times was founded by members of the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which merged in 1982 to form DSA.)

So it is disconcerting to read an open letter in The Nation, signed by 81 former leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, that condescends to tell DSA youth to “face facts.” Those facts being: “A common effort to unseat [Trump] is our high moral and political responsibility.” The signatories are “gravely concerned.” They worry that some Bernie supporters have refused to endorse Biden, “including the leadership of Democratic Socialists of America.”

Before being so quick with the pen, these members of the “Old New Left”—as they describe themselves—should have considered how DSA operates, what its members do and the considerations that inform its approach.

DSA is a democratic organization. At the most recent convention, delegates voted to only endorse candidates who openly identify as socialists, like Bernie Sanders.

But the group’s stance on 2020 does not mean DSA members will be sitting out the election. After Sanders suspended his campaign, DSA’s governing body, the 16-member National Political Committee (elected every two years by ranked-choice voting), issued this statement: “We fully agree with Sen. Sanders that taking on the reactionary, racist and nationalist right wing represented by Donald Trump is imperative for the survival of millions of working-class people across the country and the world.

Each of the 325 DSA chapters sets its own agenda, working on local issues like housing justice, immigrant rights and environmental efforts. Chapters will also be turning out the vote for their own endorsed democratic socialist and anticapitalist candidates. Many DSA members are also organizing around national initiatives, such as saving the Postal Service, supporting laid-off restaurant workers, and forming the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (in partnership with the United Electrical workers) to offer logistical support for workplace organizing.

Are DSA’s critics in The Nation engaged in similar efforts in their local communities? Generic anti-Trumpism and leftward tut-tutting is not a winning campaign strategy. It is choosing ease over effort, convenience over organizing.

Maybe DSA is wrong. Perhaps it should expressly direct members in swing states to vote Biden. The group’s position, however, is informed by an assessment of both its limited capacity to influence national elections and the limited utility of its endorsements—and certainly not by indifference to the threat Trump poses.

The wider progressive movement faces many challenges. A politically vibrant, youth-led Democratic Socialists of America is not one of them. In fact, DSA is building what so many respectable gray heads on the Left have long called for: an internally democratic political organization that anchors a vision of democratic socialism to immediate social democratic demands, and that resists the siren song of quixotic third-partyism.

Maybe we Boomers are just cranky because we are not in charge.

]]>Joel BleifussWed, 27 May 2020 11:40:00 +0000Fired from Dollar General for Speaking Out About Unsafe Conditionshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22545/fired-from-dollar-general-for-speaking-out-about-unsafe-conditions/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22545/fired-from-dollar-general-for-speaking-out-about-unsafe-conditions/Maximillian AlvarezTue, 26 May 2020 17:51:00 +0000The Language of Extinctionhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22508/language-extinction-climate-change-wild-fires-australia-indigenous-people/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22508/language-extinction-climate-change-wild-fires-australia-indigenous-people/It is often the case now that we do not know of an animal’s or insect’s or plant’s existence—do not ever hear its name—until it is almost gone.

When that species lives across the globe from where we live, this is, in one sense, not surprising. And still, it’s strange that language travels this way, the names of things populating faraway tongues for the first time at the moment they are disappearing. Such was the case this winter when I obtained a list published by the Australian Department of Environment and Energy of vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered species whose habitats have diminished since the bushfires began in July 2019. The fires had spread red on the maps, red on the aerial news cameras, as I watched from afar in horror in the midst of winter in the United States, a winter that hadn’t yet made me shiver until I saw the summer flames engulfing the Australian continent, and the images of koalas and kangaroos trying to escape the blazes.

I also wanted to know the names of living beings that weren’t mentioned on the news; I had never heard of the more than 330 species that filled the list. The names alone—to say nothing of the lives of the things in their various habitats—are a poem, the entire bulk of which would not fit here. I felt compelled to read them aloud:

For 114 of the species, the report stated, more than half their known habitat has been damaged by fire. As I said their names, I imagined the list not only as a poem but as a roster, with fewer and fewer answering “here.”

It is not lost on me that almost all the names of the species are given in English, the language I write and speak in, and Australia’s dominant language. The inhabitants of the continent once spoke roughly 250 different languages with 800 distinct dialects, Rhonda Smith at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies tells me; now there are only 13. What names were these insects and plants and animals called in the 800 dialects? And what living things were lost entirely along with the people who shared a habitat with them?

The sweeping flames seem to mirror the way one worldview—that of domination and extraction—has engulfed the globe, leaving behind cultural homogeneity, what environmentalist Vandana Shiva calls “monoculture of the mind.”

The modern industrial and capitalist mindset pits human culture against nature, and the conservation movement, with different intentions, has tended to do the same. But a wave of anthropological and biological scholarship since the 1990s has made it clear that cultural diversity and biological diversity are intertwined. One study, for example, shows 70% of the world’s languages are found “within the planet’s biodiversity hotspots.” A proliferation of life goes hand in hand with a richness of human language, story, song and oral histories, all of which serve as vessels in indigenous cultures for the complex ecological knowledge needed for good land management. That there is no word for “nature” in indigenous languages the world over indicates the degree to which indigenous people have seen their cultures as interwoven with their living habitats.

Though fire is the source of the destruction in Australia, the tragedy has compelled indigenous people across the continent to share their cultural stories about how fire has been used to nurture biodiversity since before European colonization, before indigenous fires, songs and stories began to be suppressed.

“Our ancestors managed this landscape for millennia and fire was one of our [principal] management tools,” writes Oliver Costello, of the Bundjalung people, in an article for The Guardian’s IndigenousX series. “Through colonization we have seen a rapid decline in our practices and, equally, a rapid decline in the values associated with this country,” Costello writes.

Controlled burning removes vegetation that is more likely to worsen wildfires; it encourages new growth and avoids burning the canopy. “In traditional times, you would’ve been punished for [burning the canopy],” former firefighter and member of the Wiradjuri people, Den Barber, tells Earther. “If you’re burning the canopy, you’re burning not only the shade that the trees offer, but you’re burning perhaps the seedbed. You’re burning habitat. You’re burning flowers. That’s where all the magic is, where all the things that sustain us are.”

The canopy is where the birds sing, another language in itself. Birds can fly away in managed fires, but in large wildfires, they become disoriented by smoke and flames. They die, their lilting songs going with them.

In his book Cultures of Habitat: On Nature, Culture, and Story, ethnobiologist Gary Paul Nabhan writes of how the Warlpiri people of Australia’s Tanami Desert once hunted an animal they called mala, a marsupial weighing less than five pounds. “[The Warlpiri] did not eat them into extinction,” writes Nabhan. They managed their habitat with controlled burning. Nabhan quotes a naturalist who explained the burning practice to him:

Aboriginal fire created a mix of old and new vegetation, and therefore of shelter and food. … The mala’s well-being is very much governed by the right kind of fire. The patchiness of aboriginal burning leaves part of the vegetation untouched. Clumps of old spinifex provide the mala with its shelter, from which it moves to new growth to feed on the seed heads and young leaves of forbs and grasses.

But with colonization came the disconnection of Warlpiri from their land, fire suppression and rabbits—an introduced species that took over the habitat. When the mala began to disappear, Nabhan writes, so did what is known as its Dreaming tradition—the rituals of songs and stories performed for the mala were stopped. A terrible silence. And then the mala were gone from the continent.

While fires raged uncontrolled this past winter, sweeping at 60 miles per hour across the continent, they once were lit with careful precision, small fires licking at the little mounds of vegetation, kindled with knowledge of each unique habitat across the country, where the 250 languages and 800 dialects were used to speak of them. The insects, plants and animals on my list are only the ones that have survived colonization and the disruption of their homes, as the 13 languages have survived the same.

And still, they survive. Native voices are still speaking. Malarndirri McCarthy, senator of Australia’s Northern Territory, said in a speech responding to the wildfires that fire “runs through all aspects of [First Nations] lives, our spirituality and the way we interact with the ecology, and it has done so for many thousands of years. … It’s knowledge that we so want to share.” And many in the country seem to be ready to receive it. Since 2007, Australia’s Indigenous Ranger program has recognized the value of traditional knowledge for conservation. More than 2,000 First Australians now manage the country’s Indigenous Protected Areas to protect biodiversity on more than 166 million acres of land and waters. These rangers are working harder than ever to bring back traditional burning.

In a New York Timesarticle, Alexis Wright, professor of Australian literature at the University of Melbourne and member of the Waanyi nation, spoke with Murrandoo Yanner, a Gangalidda leader who runs the Jigija Indigenous Fire Training Program. “If we can understand, learn from and imagine our place through the laws and stories of our ancestors … then we will have true knowledge on how to live, adapt and survive in Australia, just as our ancestors did,” Yanner said.

Yet, the ancestors did not face climate change and its increase of drought and fire.

In a Cherokee story I have heard from the original inhabitants of the place I am from—the Smoky Mountains, some of the world’s most diverse temperate forests, which saw unprecedented wildfires blazing the ridges in 2016—the animals decide to steal fire from a lightningstruck sycamore tree because they are cold. When Känäne’skï Amai’yëhï, the Water Spider, finally gets it for them, they gather around it, grateful.

That humans could wield fire and control it made us unique and helped us survive. The ability to cook our food may be what made us intelligent enough to drill into the earth for the fuel of ancient fossilized forests. But when we lit fossil fuels on fire, our population skyrocketed and the world changed. Now it’s getting hotter each day, due to the warming caused by the billions of fires in our gas furnaces, coal plants and combustion engines. All these fires have led to a world now suffering from more uncontrollable fire, wild fire.

“Consciousness is kin to fire,” Christopher Camuto writes in Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, and I imagine the first stories of our origins told around the fire, flames leaping across the face of storytellers and dancing at the edges of the night. Now we sit around a different fire with a different story on our lips—not of origins but of the ends of so many things. We’re not cold anymore. The animals once contrived to steal fire to warm themselves, but now they are running from it. If fire is kin to consciousness, then humankind is more conscious than ever of the role we have played in this catastrophe, of how much our stories, whether of domination and extraction or of stewardship and care, matter.

If fire is kin to consciousness, our imaginations must be sparked greater than ever before, and faster, by these large blazes—in order that we might remember how to wield fire consciously, so that our stories, our names for animals, insects and plants, might still be spoken. So that the languages of all the living things might still be heard.

]]>Holly HaworthFri, 22 May 2020 17:30:00 +0000Workers Fight for Their Liveshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22512/essential-workers-fight-for-hazard-pay-and-safe-working-conditions/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22512/essential-workers-fight-for-hazard-pay-and-safe-working-conditions/At a time of record unemployment, Cintya Medina feels lucky to have a job at the Barnes & Noble warehouse in Monroe, N.J.—but she does not want a job that puts her in danger.

When Medina and her coworkers learned of several confirmed Covid-19 cases at the warehouse, they organized a protest on April 7 to demand a two-week shutdown and full cleaning.

“If you continue to make workers like me go back to work, you’re not going to stop the spread of the virus because it’s highly contagious,” Medina tells In These Times in Spanish through a translator. She also questioned why the chain bookseller was forcing employees to come in at all: “It doesn’t make sense that we continue to be open because we’re not essential right now.” Businesses deemed essential, such as pharmacies and grocery stores, have special exceptions to operate during pandemic lockdown orders.

Medina is one of millions of workers who are stuck with the impossible choice between protecting their health and getting a paycheck. More than 36 million others cannot work at all, laid off from their jobs since mid-March and left wrangling with their local unemployment office. Many are simply excluded from other benefits, all while the country hurtles toward a depression.

The workers faring best during the pandemic are those with high wages, access to healthcare, paid sick leave and the ability to work from home. But those benefits are exceedingly rare for much of the workforce, says Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-oriented think tank. The coronavirus crisis has “uncovered the weakness in our social safety net,” she says. More than 40% of workers are employed in low-wage jobs and some 28 million non-elderly adults lack health insurance. Moreover, federal data suggests only about 30% of workers have the ability to work from home—and the rate is even lower for black and Latino workers.

Workers making poverty wages in precarious jobs were struggling to survive well before the pandemic. Now, besieged by economic devastation and a public health crisis, they are in a fight for their lives. Just as the virus has exposed the vicious inequities ingrained in the country’s economic hierarchy, so is it galvanizing workers to organize for safe workplaces, fair pay, decent medical leave and the right to challenge bosses who put them in harm’s way.

Low Pay, Essential Work

Jake Douglas made $14 an hour as a driver for United Airlines’ catering service at Denver International Airport, but he took a voluntary unpaid layoff in late March. His partner is immunocompromised, and Douglas worried about potentially getting infected. Ironically, his decision to try to protect his health could cost him his healthcare. Though Douglas remains on his employer-sponsored health plan, he has lost his income, is still waiting to get benefits from the state’s overwhelmed unemployment-claim system, and fears he might no longer be able to afford his health insurance payments. Meanwhile, he suffers from a longstanding shoulder injury that hampers his employment options.

“I don’t know how I’m going to be able to return to work without physical therapy at a minimum, but probably surgery,” he says. “And so I’m just really nervous ... I do not know what I’m going to be able to do to survive this thing if it drags on.”

Douglas’ economic precarity is shared by millions of laid-off workers, who are disproportionately women, black or Latino.

Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, says the economic devastation of the coronavirus will “be tremendously damaging for lower-wage workers, who tend to not have savings and assets to withstand economic shocks like this.”

The CARES Act—the federal stimulus package passed in late March—was intended to cushion the job losses precipitated by the pandemic. Its expansions of unemployment assistance include an extra $600 tacked onto state unemployment benefits, plus an unprecedented extension of assistance to the self-employed, such as Uber and Lyft drivers and other gig workers.

But Shierholz argues unemployment insurance is not an ideal way to deliver relief to dislocated workers. Mass layoffs, she says, would ultimately slow down the recovery, by requiring businesses to rebuild their workforce from scratch as they reopen. “It’s incredibly better for both workers and businesses to furlough but not lay off,” she says. “But we don’t really have a culture of holding onto workers during a downturn and then just bringing them back online after the downturn is over.”

Several European governments have opted to preserve jobs by subsidizing companies to keep workers on their payrolls. By contrast, the U.S. relief package offered an extremely limited pool of supplementary loans for small businesses to avoid laying off staff (which was quickly exhausted, and hastily replenished), while hundreds of billions of dollars were funneled into massive hotel, retail and supermarket corporations—largely free of any concrete mandates to retain workers.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates some 12.7 million laid-off workers lost their employer-sponsored health plans between early March and the end of April—just as their families (who likely shared those health plans) will need care to deal with the growing public health crisis.

None of the federal stimulus acts have expanded healthcare coverage, aside from providing funds for hospitals and testing, although Democratic lawmakers have proposed expansions of Medicaid and of some private insurance coverage.

Givan emphasizes that millions of workers never had insurance in the first place for myriad reasons, whether they were undocumented, or their jobs never offered it, or they couldn’t afford it. Many are still working without healthcare, often in frontline jobs that expose them to health risks every day, as they staff grocery stores, clean hospitals and deliver goods.

“We’re saying, ‘Do this job that’s essential to the functioning of our society ... and you will risk being infected with this virus,’ ” Givan says. “And if that happens, you’ll be left with large bills or with no access to care, whether that’s because you’re undocumented, uninsured or under-insured.”

Underpaid Heroes

A worker’s ability to stay healthy amid the pandemic hinges on their ability to take time off without sacrificing their wages. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, seven in 10 low-wage workers did not have a single paid sick day. The recently passed Families First Coronavirus Response Act provides two weeks of paid leave for full-time employees affected by Covid-19. Additionally, the CARES Act temporarily extends federal family medical leave laws to provide workers with limited wage replacement for the care of a child, for up to 12 weeks.

But again, the protections are patchy. The paid leave and child care provisions exclude private employers with 500 or more employees and allow an exemption for firms with fewer than 50 employees. These carve-outs could effectively exclude up to 106 million private-sector workers, including millions of the poorest.

Josh (a pseudonym to protect him from employer retaliation) is a Walmart pharmacy assistant in Illinois and a self-described “Walmart baby”—the son of Walmart employees. He fears that, while keeping the nation’s largest retailer operating, he and his parents are exposed daily to hazardous conditions. Although workers have some protective equipment, he says, what they really need is adequate paid leave to protect themselves and their families.

In March, Walmart announced a new two-week paid leave policy for employees who test positive for the virus—but it excludes workers who, for example, are immunocompromised or tending to ill family members. Josh, who is part of the worker advocacy group United for Respect, notes that people are reluctant to actually use what paid leave they have in fear of “repercussion from management.”

“For [my parents] to not be treated and protected on a daily basis ... just irks me to the highest degree,” Josh says. He suggests workers be compensated with hazard pay, so they can at least have their “essential” role reflected in their paycheck.

“[People say] we’re heroes and everything—but it doesn’t feel like we’re heroes,” Josh adds. “It feels like we don’t have a choice.” With hazard pay, “at least [workers] might get a little bit of solace in knowing that, ‘Hey, I’m working during this. My job’s important.’ Helping people is definitely worth more than $8 an hour.”

Demanding A Just Workplace

Some workers in high-risk jobs are banding together to demand their bosses do more to keep them safe.

Jordan Flowers, a worker at Amazon’s JFK8 facility in Staten Island, protested alongside coworkers in late March and early April to demand the company close its workplace until it could be fully sanitized, as reports emerged that as many as 25 workers had contracted Covid-19. “We’re in a warehouse of 5,000 people,” Flowers says. “You never know who is sick.”

The walkouts at JFK8 followed similar actions at Chicago and Detroit Amazon facilities, and were part of a national campaign to expand paid leave policies for affected workers. (Amazon provides two weeks of paid leave only for employees diagnosed or quarantined with Covid-19.)

Workers who help secure the nation’s food supply are also demanding respect and fatter paychecks.

Unionized grocery workers with United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) have successfully pressured several large supermarket chains and food producers to secure hazard pay, extra sanitation provisions and paid leave for hundreds of thousands of members. Workers at non-unionized chains, such as Trader Joe’s, are also campaigning for improved safety protections and hazard pay. (Trader Joe’s has made some reforms, like additional paid leave, but at the same time, sent employees a strident antiunion letter to deter organizing.) Meanwhile, Instacart workers—who provide home grocery delivery services for various outlets—went on strike in late March to demand safety equipment and $5 per order in hazard pay.

Meat-processing workers have mobilized to refuse work at claustrophobic plants where hundreds of Covid-19 cases have surfaced. An estimated 830 workers at the JBS USA meat-processing plant in Greeley, Colorado, called off work en masse, and about 50 Perdue chicken-processing workers walked off the job in late March. After some plants temporarily shuttered following outbreaks, President Trump ordered in late April that they remain open as a “critical industry.”

Some of the lowest-paid food service workers are agitating for better safety protections as well. In early April, McDonald’s workers staged protests and walkouts in Los Angeles, St. Louis and other cities to demand hazard pay and adequate safeguards. In San Jose, 26-year-old drive-through worker Irving Garza staged an informal strike with several coworkers to demand hazard pay and safety gear. Customers are constantly hovering within a few feet of his window, most not wearing masks. “I’m breathing the same air that they’re breathing ... so I’m putting myself at a big risk,” he says.

Some companies, including Amazon, Instacart, JBS USA, Perdue, McDonald’s and Barnes & Noble, have introduced new safety measures, such as more intensive cleaning, masks and social-distancing rules, and in a few cases, provided additional paid sick leave for Covid-19.

But, fundamentally, workers are standing up for something more: a voice. In terms of physically safeguarding workers’ health, Givan explains, employers can offer protections at their discretion, but “anything that’s given by the good grace of the employer can be taken away just as easily.”

During the McDonald’s protests, the company announced plans to increase safety protections at its restaurants, including distributing masks and hand sanitizer—though it admitted the rollout was still in process at its restaurants, most of which are independently operated franchisees. As of mid-April, protests continued. Garza, who relies on his fast-food job to support his mother and several siblings, returned to work after his manager provided additional safety equipment, but since going on strike, his hours were cut in half.

“McDonald’s should listen to its workers ... because they are all at the bottom of the pyramid,” he says. To the bosses, he says, “And we’re not serving you. You are serving us, because we’re the ones that are working. We’re the ones who are making the sales happen, who are working on the line ... so just listen to the workers.”

No Papers, No Relief

Many of the workers hardest hit by the pandemic, whether they are laid off or soldiering on in their essential jobs, will receive no support from federal relief legislation—because they are undocumented.

So people like Fredy Moreno, an undocumented construction worker in the Twin Cities, won’t get the $1,200 stimulus check other households look forward to. But he has bigger worries, like the more than $13,000 he says he is owed by a previous employer. With the economic downturn compounding his prior employer’s wage theft, Moreno is desperate to get back to work despite the health risks.

“I don’t have the rent,” Moreno says through a Spanish translator. “I don’t have money to buy food for my family. I have a small child. ... I don’t have money to go out and buy diapers—if there are even diapers to go buy. It’s been pretty difficult.”

With construction jobs drying up, Moreno laments the exclusion of undocumented workers, who contribute roughly $27 billion in local, state and federal taxes annually, from the federal relief package. “I think that we should be included,” he says, “because we also work, and we also pay taxes … and I think our families also matter.”

While the federal relief package shuts out undocumented workers, several immigrant-focused labor groups, such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), Make the Road New York and Alianza Agrícola, have launched relief funds for workers or pressed state lawmakers to help undocumented workers access aid. In mid-April, NDLON sent a “protest caravan” to California’s statehouse. A day later, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a statewide $125 million relief fund for immigrant workers, regardless of status.

Viral Resistance

Some labor advocates hope the pandemic, and the worker uprisings it is spurring, could compel policymakers, employers and the public to address critical gaps in the welfare system and to start to give frontline workers the respect and fair compensation their essential labor deserves.

The crisis might ultimately “create a moment in the public dialogue and in the political imagination about the choices that we’re making,” says Wendy ChunHoon, executive director of Family Values @ Work, an advocacy group focused on paid leave policies. “Because we could value childcare and care jobs, and the entire care infrastructure … as [equally] important as the carveouts that we’re giving [to] large corporations right now. It’s a choice that we’re making as a country—we could choose differently.”

Kent Wong, director of the Labor Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the pandemic “has exposed fundamental basic contradictions in the way public policy has been formulated to benefit the narrow interest of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in the country, at the expense of the vast majority.” He adds the ongoing economic devastation could spur “public demand to address some of these basic structural issues within our society” to provide “a sustainable standard of living for working people.”

Right now, most workers are focused on protecting their health and feeding their families. But the momentum of grassroots organizing in the face of Covid-19 could eventually inspire more workers to form unions, call for comprehensive family-leave policies and demand employers protect jobs through arrangements like work-sharing, which allows employers to use the unemployment system to reduce work hours while avoiding layoffs.

General Electric workers recently agitated at plants in Massachusetts, New York, Texas and Virginia, not only for health protections at work but for jobs that protect the health of others. As members of the Industrial Division of the Communications Workers of America, they demanded better sanitary conditions and expanded paid leave, along with the conversion of factories where workers have been laid off—which usually produce industrial parts, such as generators and jet engines—to manufacture respirators for coronavirus patients.

Douglas, the former airline-catering employee, is organizing with other airport and service-industry workers under the banner of the Denver Democratic Socialists of America to pressure the city and state government to cancel rent, mortgage and utility bills for 90 days. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced a similar federal bill to cancel rent and mortgage payments, which has been co-sponsored by Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.) and Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), among others.

“All of us feel that if we can’t work, we can’t pay,” Douglas says. As more residents are laid off, then “there’s a tipping point and a crisis coming regardless, and our local elected officials need to do everything they can to support us right now, because the system can’t sustain itself.”

The economy “will never be what it was before,” says Erica Smiley, executive director of the workers’ rights group Jobs with Justice, but says the labor movement has a chance to organize for a more just future. “The question is, will [post-pandemic society] be reorganized to continue to move more resources to those at the top? ... Or will it be forever changed in a way that more ordinary people are put into positions to make decisions about our general health and well-being as a society?” Smiley says.

“It will be a fight either way.”

]]>Michelle ChenThu, 21 May 2020 20:51:00 +0000Covid-19 Profiteers Are Making a Killinghttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22539/covid-19-profiteers-are-making-a-killing/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22539/covid-19-profiteers-are-making-a-killing/Two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared coronavirus a global pandemic, the United States stands as the nation with the most confirmed cases. The WHO warns that the worst is yet to come. Yet President Donald Trump has signaled that he wants the economy to reopen as soon as possible, despite countless warnings from public health experts that opening too soon can cause a spike in deaths.

Big corporations and their head honchos have joined the president in downplaying the dangers and gunning for a reopening. Elon Musk told SpaceX employees that it's more dangerous to drive a car than to be exposed to coronavirus. Hobby Lobby founder David Green made headlines when he claimed keeping his stores open was a part of God’s plan, and initially defied state shutdowns. Corporate-funded conservative groups like FreedomWorks are lobbying federal and state legislators and orchestrating astroturf anti-lockdown protests at state capitols. In April, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg joined the president on phone calls to discuss reopening the economy as soon as possible.

Perhaps denial is easy when you can afford to sequester yourself.

While Amazon workers across the country are now fighting to keep their $2 hazard pay raise, the nation’s wealthiest are hiding out in apocalyptic bunkers and making requests for private, at-home doctor’s visits that cost upwards of about $1,500. In mid-April, when doctor’s offices nationwide still faced a shortage of testing kits, Florida residents of Fisher Island—the richest ZIP code in the nation—purchased 1,800 antibody tests for themselves just in case Covid-19 penetrated their very gated community. In New York, 40% of residents were unable to pay rent in April, according to The New York Times. In New York City, the most affluent fled in droves, emptying out well-to-do neighborhoods like the Upper East Side, the West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights by 40%.

It’s clear that the 1% are playing by an entirely different set of rules.

84-year-old billionaire Ken Langone, co-founder of Home Depot, called up his buddies at NYU Langone in February to get a feel for the severity of coronavirus. “What I’ve been told by people who are smarter than me in disease is, ‘As of right now it’s a bad flu,’” Langone told Bloomberg News from the comfort of his North Palm Beach, Fla., home.

But it’s become clear that the coronavirus is very, very different from the common flu. The WHO has determined that Covid's reproductive number is significantly higher: One infected individual can infect 2 to 2.5 more people than the flu, whose sufferers typically only infect up to 1.3 others. (Langone has since changed his tone on reopening, telling CNBC, “Our part as citizens should be stay home, obey separation.” Home Depot has instituted temperature checks for workers, shorter hours, customer limits, paid leave, hazard pay and no-co-pay healthcare.)

Due to the nationwide shortage of testing kits, it’s hard to know exactly how many people this pandemic is affecting. America’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, is certain the approximately 80,000 reported Covid-related deaths is a significant undercount. Some experts estimate that total deaths in the U.S. may be twice as high as reported.

What can be more easily measured are the ways some companies are profiting from the changes wrought by the virus. As Americans eagerly sanitized every nook and cranny of their homes, cars and shopping carts, sales of Clorox cleaning supplies rose by 32% in the first quarter of 2020. Zoom and Slack Technologies have also seen increases in their profits as working from home has become the new normal. Slack has added 80% more customers compared to the previous quarter, while Zoom hosts more than 300 million participants each day—boosting its stock price by 150%. In the first 23 days after the initial lockdowns began, America’s billionaire class raked in over $282 billion in personal wealth, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.

Profiteering on Covid began almost as soon as the crisis hit. The makers of air purifier Molekule proclaimed in February they were “very confident that this technology will destroy coronavirus,” and rival Airpura claimed on its website in March that its devices are 99.99% effective in removing coronavirus. However, scientists hadn’t tested the purifier’s efficiency at eliminating coronavirus molecules—only that of similar diseases, like smallpox and Ebola. Experts say that coronavirus particles are too small to be blocked by the filters in air purifiers. (Airpura later removed the claim).

In March, third party sellers on Amazon began jacking up the prices on hand sanitizer. Sniffing out the opportunity for a windfall, profiteers bought out scarce supplies at grocery stores and resold them at exorbitant rates. It wasn’t long before Amazon curtailed the practice by banning new listings for masks and sanitizer. But Amazon happily continued to turn its own profit: The company’s earnings increased by $33 million every hour of the first quarter, even as its warehouses suffered coronavirus outbreaks and workers walked out over unsafe conditions. Bezos, the world’s richest man, has accumulated an additional $25 billion since the beginning of this year, putting him on track to become the first-ever trillionaire.

With a vaccine a year or more off and a president who keeps dismissing the severity of the pandemic, U.S. consumers will continue to pour their money into empty or uncertain promises. Online sales have spiked over the last several weeks. In-store sales have declined while online shopping has peaked to almost 40% after the first round of stimulus checks went out.

DoorDash, whose drivers are paid with a tipped minimum wage, is holding its foot on the necks of other meal-delivery services like HelloFresh and Blue Apron. Instacart is coming out on top and leaving major companies like Amazon and Walmart in the dust with a nearly 500% increase in sales in mid-April. Still, Instacart workers said the company was slow to hand out PPE.

Meanwhile, with “non-essential” businesses ordered closed in many states, more than 33 million Americans have filed for unemployment since early March. The billionaires who own many of those businesses are panicking. As they push for the economy to reopen, they’ve made one thing very clear: They aren’t the ones making their own wealth, their workers are.

]]>Amber Colón NúñezThu, 21 May 2020 16:30:00 +0000Asian-American Groups Demand Biden Take Down His ‘Anti-China’ Adhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22538/biden-trump-china-racism-asian-american-groups-military-pivot-covid/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22538/biden-trump-china-racism-asian-american-groups-military-pivot-covid/“We are trying to get out the vote, trying to get Asian-Americans to show up, but Biden is not showing up for us,” says Michelle Liang, an organizer with NAKASEC Action Fund, an Asian-American advocacy organization working on voter turnout in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

Liang is one of eight co-authors, and more than 500 signatories, of an open letter to Joe Biden, calling on the former vice president to renounce the belligerent anti-Chinese rhetoric of a recent video ad for his campaign, released as Covid-19 continued to spread worldwide. The authors of the letter, which was signed by a broad range of Asian-American and progressive organizations, say they “share the Biden campaign’s goal of defeating Trump,” but that goal is hampered by Biden’s embrace of rhetoric vilifying their communities, which are already targeted by Trump’s anti-Chinese invectives. The open letter is just one part of a larger outcry as Biden’s campaign jockeys to show it’s “tougher” on China than Trump—rather than articulate a vision that clearly diverges from the anti-China nationalism the president is using to gin up his base.

“It is disheartening to see the vilification of China and Asia and to hear Trump using this global pandemic to push out this pro-ban, anti-immigrant, anti-Chinese agenda,” says Liang. “We are seeing Biden fall into the same trap.”

The ad in question, called “Unprepared” and released by the Biden campaign on April 18, blamed Trump’s lack of aggression towards China and Chinese travelers for enabling the global outbreak of Covid-19. The video starts by slamming Trump for his failure to send health experts to China to investigate the outbreak. “Trump rolled over for the Chinese,” the narrator states, making no distinction between Chinese people and the government of China. The ad goes on to assert that Trump’s praise of the Chinese is evidence of his lack of a backbone. “And the travel ban he brags about,” the video continues, “Trump let in 40,000 from China into America after he signed it, not exactly air-tight.”

Grace Pai is the Director of Movement Politics for Asian American Midwest Progressives, and a co-author of the letter. She tells In These Times, “When I first heard the ad, I thought it might be a Trump ad because of the talking points to demonize travelers from China and to place blame for Covid-19 in the United States on Chinese travelers. It concerned me personally being Asian American in this climate, when we've seen a rise in anti-Asian racist, violent attacks, because of the president's messaging tying this virus to China.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that coronavirus originated in a Wuhan lab that researches viruses among bats, and Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro even went so far as to accuse China of using airline travelers to spread the virus globally—both accusations denied by Trump’s own intelligence officials. Trump has also repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus,” even as the World Health Organization warned against tying a particular ethnicity or nationality to the outbreak, to avoid stigma.

These invectives are not isolated. A messaging guide from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, dated April 17, instructs candidates to emphasize that "China caused this pandemic by covering it up, lying, and hoarding the world's supply of medical equipment." It paints China as an "adversary" that has "stolen millions of American jobs" and "sent fentanyl to the United States." The memo, which was reported in the Intercept, instructs Republicans to "attack China.”

Within this atmosphere, people who are perceived to be Chinese have seen an uptick in racist attacks and harassment. Russell Jeung, chair of San Francisco State University’s Asian American Studies department, published an analysis which found that, between March 19 and April 15, there were 1,497 reports of “coronavirus discrimination” submitted to the “Stop AAPI Hate” website, targeting people of Chinese, Korean, Cambodian, Japanese and other ethnicities. The Washington Postreported on May 19 that Asian-American healthcare workers, in particularly, “have reported a rise in bigoted incidents.”

“People have been insulted, spat on, beaten, and injured; in one incident a man attempted to murder a family, stabbing children aged two and [six], allegedly because he believed they were spreading COVID-19,” the open letter states. “The ‘Unprepared’ ad may make this worse.”

On May 14, Biden shared a modified version of the “Unprepared” ad that says "Chinese government" instead of "Chinese" and doesn't include the "40,000 travelers" line. However, Pai says the new video is still "problematic." She explains, "This new ad may specify the Chinese government as opposed to Chinese people, but the average American will hear that and conflate it with people they perceive to be Chinese on the street. This is still part of China-bashing. You may tweak the language but the core message comes through." Meanwhile, the original version has not been taken down from Biden's YouTube page.

This video is not an isolated case. Another, created by pro-Biden super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, uses a similar line of criticism that Trump is a pushover to China. As the Trump camp releases ads trying to depict Biden as soft on China, and the Right labels him “Beijing Biden,” Biden appears to be countering this messaging with his own anti-China message, even as he, at times, denounces Trump’s xenophobia.

This approach is not taking place in a vacuum. A memo from the war room of the Democratic National Committee, established in 2017 to oppose Trump, cites the claim that “Trump rolled over for China” as a key talking point, as the Intercept reports. “There is no question that China must be held accountable,” the memo states. “But Trump has proven that he’s not capable of doing that. He spent weeks and weeks offering absurd flattery of China and unwarranted praise for its transparency as the crisis developed.”

Confrontational footing

Anti-China rhetoric has implications far beyond U.S. borders. The open letter notes that ratcheting up hostility towards China could undermine global efforts to curb the spread of Covid-19. “Tensions between the U.S. and China have damaged efforts to confront Covid-19 by undermining urgently needed global cooperation around the provision of medical supplies as well as research into treatment and a vaccine,” the letter states. “While many of us have been critical of the Chinese government and its initial response to the Covid-19 outbreak, it is clear that U.S.-China cooperation is an urgent and overriding priority until the pandemic is under control.”

Tobita Chow, the director of "Justice is Global" and co-author of the letter (who serves on the board of In These Times), says, “There are a bunch of problems with the use of anti-China messaging from the Biden campaign and DNC infrastructure. In addition to the rise of anti-Asian racism and how this has undermined the global cooperation we need to beat Covid-19, there's a march to military confrontation towards China. What we're seeing from the hawks in the national security establishment, as well as the anti-China right-wing nationalists that have taken over the GOP, is they’re talking about the U.S.-China relationship in terms of a new cold war.”

There were already signs that the Trump administration was taking a confrontational posture before the Covid-19 crisis hit: Trump has made “great power competition” with China an integral part of his military strategy, and under his administration, annual military budgets have increasingly embraced a U.S. military pivot towards confronting Russia and China.

But since the Covid-19 outbreak began, we’ve seen a marked ecalatation, with the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command recently requesting an additional $20 billion to “deter” Chinese military action in the region. As CNN reported on May 15, over the past few weeks, “U.S. Navy ships and Air Force B-1 bombers have undertaken missions aimed at sending a very public message that the US military intends to maintain a presence in the region and reassure allies.” This escalation is accompanied by increased diplomatic pressure from the Trump administration, as well as open accusations from the Pentagon that “China is attempting to use the regional focus on Covid to assertively advance its own interests,” CNN reports.

While the letter does not address Biden’s track record in the Obama administration, his remarks reflect a broader history of bipartisan military escalation against China. A confrontational stance towards China was also a cornerstone of the Obama-Biden administration, which embraced an “Asia-Pacific pivot,” that, however incomplete, had a significant impact on the region. The Obama administration reached an agreement with the Philippines in 2016 to establish a permanent U.S. presence at five military bases in the country, and supported the efforts of conservative Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to remove language from Japan’s constitution prohibiting the use of force in international disputes. Under Obama, the United States negotiated with the previous right-wing South Korea government to launch a THAAD missile system, touching off large protests.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a NAFTA-like trade policy aimed at hedging against China, was largely viewed as an economic corollary to this military uptick. "People are saying we don't want more U.S. militarization in our countries," Rhonda Ramiro, Vice Chair of BAYAN-USA—an alliance of Filipino organizations in the United States—told me in 2014, amid protests against the TPP and U.S. military pivot at U.S. embassies in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines. "This is about U.S. military power and economic domination."

Biden publicly embraced this “rebalancing,” assuring Australia in July 2016 that the Asia-Pacific pivot would continue regardless of who was in the White House. “The United States has kept and will keep a laser focus on the future in the Asia-Pacific,” he proclaimed. And he has, at times, echoed confrontational talking points from the campaign trail, declaring in a December 2019 presidential debate, “We should be moving 60% of our sea power to that area of the world.”

Lindsay Koshgarian, program director of the National Priorities Project and co-author of a recent report on U.S. militarism and climate change, told In These Times that a confrontational U.S. posture towards China, no matter who is in the White House, has dire implications. “The thing I'm the most worried about long-term with China is the real danger that we are going to get in a cold war and blow our chances on climate change,” she says. “The most obvious thing is that we could have communication between the countries degrade to the point that we can't have a new Paris Agreement that has both countries. But now, if China and the United States get into an arms race, we will be taking those resources away from any other response to climate change.”

While the Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Politico noted in an April 23 article that “the Biden campaign pointed out that Biden has ‘blasted’ the hateful acts against Asian Americans and that he’s condemned Trump for using terms like ‘Chinese virus’ to describe the pandemic. But it defended the recent ad.” The article quotes a statement from the Biden campaign: “Our ad levels substantive and deserved criticisms at Donald Trump for believing discredited Chinese government propaganda about containment of the virus—something Joe Biden publicly warned him not to fall for. That misjudgment has had devastating consequences for the American people.”

But activists say they want a full retraction of the ad. “The ‘Unprepared’ ad must be taken down, and all campaign messaging that fuels anti-Asian racism and China-bashing must end,” states the open letter.

In the words of Pai, “I’m looking towards November and thinking, is this what we're going to see for next six months from now to the election? Are we going to keep seeing this escalated China message?”

noun

“Wisconsin voters had to choose between making their voice heard and keeping [themselves] safe. No American should ever have to make that choice.” —Michelle Obama on Wisconsin's Pandemic Primary

In other words, the new normal for elections during a pandemic?

In a sane world, yes, all remaining 2020 elections should be conducted by mail for public health reasons. But that doesn’t stop our president from claiming that vote-by-mail is “RIPE for FRAUD.” (Ironically, Trump cast his Florida primary ballot by mail this year.) In April, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor pushed for a postponed and completely mail-in primary due to the risk of in-person voting amid the pandemic, but the GOP-controlled state legislature pushed back with support from the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and in-person voting went ahead as planned—turning vote-by-mail into a major partisan issue.

Don’t most states already allow vote-by-mail?

All states allow some form of absentee voting and a number of states—including some with Republican governors, like New Hampshire, Maryland and Ohio—are taking measures to expand vote-by-mail, but more than a dozen require voters to have a specific reason they can’t make it to the polls, such as disability or travel. In Texas, a legal battle over the issue is brewing along party lines.

What are the objections to vote-by-mail?

The objections are mostly ideological, but the claims that vote-by-mail encourages fraud and benefits Democrats are empirically untrue. Another objection involves the burden put on states. Expanding vote-by-mail in time for November will require some states to quickly adopt new software and staff, something the federal government can (and should) help with. The latest coronavirus relief bill allocates $400 million to states for election security, which could be used to expand vote-by-mail programs (though many Republican-controlled state legislatures have been busy with voter suppression measures since at least 2013, when the Supreme Court struck down part of the Voting Rights Act).

How do we make sure we actually get to vote in November?

A rapid transition to vote-by-mail elections may cause some confusion at first, so election officials will need to make appropriate accommodations. The Brennan Center estimates that securing the 2020 election against Covid-19 could cost up to $2 billion, mostly to print and post ballots while keeping voters informed. Voting-rights experts are not calling for an exclusively vote-by-mail system in 2020, however, which would effectively disenfranchise some communities. Voters on Native American reservations often rely on faraway post office boxes, for example, while other voters rely on translation services and voting machines that accommodate disabilities. But offering mail-in ballots for all while expanding early voting sites would go a long way toward safe and fair elections—the bare minimum of democracy, really.

]]>In These Times EditorsWed, 20 May 2020 11:35:00 +0000We Should Own the Internet—Not Silicon Valley Oligarchshttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22536/internet-silicon-valley-broadband-covid-19-democracy/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22536/internet-silicon-valley-broadband-covid-19-democracy/In early May, the New York Timespublished a photo of Beth Revis, a fiction writer in Rutherfordton, North Carolina, scrunched into the back of a small vehicle in a parking lot. There, she was using her smartphone to try to teach a class, using the only reliable internet connection she had access to—the free Wi-Fi signal emanating from inside a local public elementary school.

As schools shut down and workplaces go remote as the result of the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of millions of Americans like Revis have become increasingly reliant on internet access for their jobs, education and social interactions.

This crisis has clearly illustrated how digital infrastructure—the core assets and services on which a vast array of information technologies rely—has become critical to the functioning of our economy and society. It is, in a sense, the modern equivalent of the interstate highways, railway tracks, telephone networks and electricity systems that formed the backbones of the 20th-century economy.

However, in the United States, market-led deployment of this critical infrastructure—along with service provision dominated by a small oligopoly of giant telecommunications corporations—has led to inadequate development and severe inequities. For instance, according to the Federal Communication Commission’s estimates (which many experts think are highly understated), more than 21 million Americans don’t have access to even a minimal high-speed broadband connection of at least 25 mbps. Internet access in the United States is also generally far slower and more expensive than in most other advanced countries.

Unavailable or unaffordable internet puts certain communities at a disadvantage and reinforces inequality. For instance, while one in five White Americans don’t have high-speed internet at home, that ratio is roughly one in three for Black Americans, and one in 2.5 for Latinx Americans. As numerous reports have indicated, communities with inadequate internet access have been unable to access remote learning opportunities during the pandemic.

If school closures persist, these students will likely fall even further behind their wealthier, and often whiter, peers. Preliminary data from the Covid-19 crisis in the United States is already revealing stark racial and socioeconomic disparities concerning who is affected medically, economically and socially. This lack of affordable and accessible internet is likely to only exacerbate these inequalities.

A new report released by The Democracy Collaborative (US) and Common Wealth (UK) contends that it is time to stop treating high-speed internet like a luxury commodity and instead consider it public infrastructure. And as with other infrastructure, this means taking it out of the hands of corporations and putting it under democratic and public control.

In the United States, one way to realize this vision is to empower and support communities that want to establish their own broadband internet networks. First and foremost, this means passing federal-level legislation that overturns pro-corporate, state-level “preemption laws” that ban or restrict municipalities from launching or expanding their own public broadband networks. Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) both supported such action during their recent presidential campaigns, and legislation to this effect—called the Community Broadband Act—has been introduced in Congress by Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.).

Rather than impede their development, federal and state governments should also directly help finance and provide technical assistance to municipal and other community-based broadband networks. That would be a far more effective and equitable use of public resources than the FCC’s current patchwork of subsidy programs, which largely benefit the telecommunications companies themselves.

A parallel effort should take place with regards to 5G wireless. In the United States, just three large corporations—AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile—are poised to control virtually all of the nation’s 5G wireless infrastructure for at least the near future. Yet there is nothing to prevent a new racial and class digital divide growing around this emerging technology. A “public option” in the wireless communications sector builds on the precedents set by such public ownership examples as Germany’s majority ownership of Deutsche Telekom and Norway’s majority ownership of Telenor, and was even reportedly being considered by President Trump in response to China’s growing state-controlled dominance in the sector. A publicly-owned wireless network could help address market failures, reduce corporate power, provide competitive pressures that would lower costs and stimulate innovation, and generate revenue to cross-subsidize other needed public services and investments.

We should also consider new, innovative ways to think about one of the public’s most valuable renewable resources, the wireless spectrum (sometimes known as the public airwaves). This asset is managed on behalf of the public by the federal government, which keeps some frequencies for public purposes and leases others out to various types of communications companies. The FCC currently conducts extremely lucrative spectrum auctions, netting tens of billions of dollars in revenue for the government. Rather than simply being deposited in the Treasury, these proceeds could, for instance, be used to capitalize democratically governed public trust funds that would be tasked with making investments in digital infrastructure, such as municipal broadband, as well as local journalism and media.

Finally, these strategies should, ultimately, be coupled with democratizing cloud computing services. These services, overwhelmingly controlled by just three companies—Amazon, Google and Microsoft—are the terrain upon which most of today’s internet activity takes place. This corporate control leads to prohibitively high costs for smaller companies seeking cloud services, excludes smaller cloud competitors, stalls innovation, and gives these powerful and largely unaccountable actors corporate control over valuable personal and business data. Many experts have suggested that if Big Tech companies are to be broken up, then cloud computing would be the logical, and ideal, first candidate. However, since cloud services play such a foundational role in the modern economy, it makes little sense to simply create new, private companies that would likely replicate the same abusive practices as their predecessors. Rather, they should be spun off from these Silicon Valley giants and converted into public utilities accountable to all of us.

Democratic public ownership of digital infrastructure can reduce corporate concentration and the outside political power of the digital giants. It can enable us to link the build-out and operation of digital infrastructure to ecological sustainability and a Green New Deal. It can be a powerful tool for addressing the racial and urban-rural digital divides. And it can provide a mechanism for people to assert control and power over their own data. Most fundamentally, it gives us a new arena for democratic decision-making and a stake in the new system we seek to build out of the devastation caused by the current Covid-19 crisis.

]]>Thomas M. Hanna and Isaiah J. Poole Tue, 19 May 2020 15:36:00 +0000Trump Administration Quietly Adds Foreign Arms Sale to List of “Essential Work”http://inthesetimes.com/article/22534/trump-essential-worker-raytheon-foreign-arms-drone/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22534/trump-essential-worker-raytheon-foreign-arms-drone/Buried on the 18th page of a recently updated federal government memo defining which workers are critical during the Covid-19 pandemic is a new category of essential workers: defense industry personnel employed in foreign arms sales.

The memo, issued April 17, is a revised version of statements issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Department of Defense in mid-March. In those, the defense industry workforce was deemed "essential" alongside healthcare professionals and food producers, a broad designation that prompted criticism from a former top acquisition official for the Pentagon, defense-spending watchdoggroups, and workers themselves. The original March memos made no mention of the tens of billions of dollars in foreign arms sales that U.S. companies make each year.

The new text indicates that the federal government deliberately expanded the scope of work for essential employees in the mid-April memo to include the "sale of U.S. defense articles and services for export to foreign allies and partners." In These Times spoke with numerous workers who instead say their plants could have shut down production for clients both domestic and foreign. The updated April 17 memo was issued as the United States reported more than 30,000 Covid-19 deaths, a number that would come close to tripling in the following weeks.

The new memo, which says essential workers are those needed "to maintain the services and functions Americans depend on daily," also reflects what defense workers tell In These Times has been a reality throughout the pandemic: Work is ongoing on military-industrial shop floors across the country, including on weapons for foreign sales.

(A memo in March said essential workers are those needed to "meet national security commitments to the federal government and U.S. military." In April, the government quietly updated the memo to include a new line of essential work: foreign arms sales.)

Arms manufacturing for export has continued at a Lockheed Martin plant in Fort Worth, which has stayed open 24 hours a day during the pandemic and manufactures the F-35 fighter jet. Asked by In These Times if F-35 production for international customers was ongoing in Fort Worth during the pandemic, a Lockheed spokesman responded that "there are no specific impacts to our operations at this time." The company has a robust slate of domestic and foreign orders to fulfill for the F-35—the most expensive weapons program in U.S. history, one the company now advertises at a price tag of at least $89 million per jet. This slate includes 98 for the United States in the fiscal year 2020 and scores for international buyers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, according to a recent report on the F-35 program from the Congressional Research Service.

An employee at the Fort Worth plant told In These Times, "I don’t think it should be designated essential if we’re not doing it for our own country. I understand these other countries have put money into it. I do understand that. But these other countries are shut down, too," the worker added, referring to the major disruptions of economic activities across the globe. The employee said they have seen computer monitors indicating jets were destined for Japan and Australia in recent weeks.

In the first weeks after the country shut down, the employee says they and their fellow workers asked themselves, "Why don’t we move these aircraft out of the way for a minute? And we have enough manpower here we could make masks. We could make ventilators." But the company's priorities for its essential workers, the employee says, has been: "Let’s get these jets and let’s get them running. Let’s pump them out the door."

Several defense industry workers told In These Times they believe on-site manufacturing work at weapons plants for both foreign and domestic use could have been suspended at least for a matter of weeks during the pandemic. They also said they worry about the feasibility of keeping busy workplaces safe and sanitary, and that they distrust employers' methods for handling virus cases that have emerged among workers.

Alarm over the expectation to continue reporting to shop floors for hands-on jobs has opened a rift between defense contractors and their employees, with the latter feeling constrained from speaking out publicly due to the confidentiality surrounding national security work. Several workers, all concerned about the risks of plants staying open, spoke with In These Times on the condition their names not be published, fearing repercussions or losing security clearances.

Ellen Lord, the Pentagon's top weapons buyer, said at an April 30 press conference that of 10,509 major companies tracked by the Defense Contract Management Agency, just 93 were closed, while 141 had closed and reopened. While many in the defense industry can work remotely—a Lockheed spokesperson told In These Times by e-mail that about 9,000 of its 18,000 employees in Fort Worth are telecommuting—the thousands that remain on plant floors, workers say, are often blue-collar employees whose jobs are hands-on. On an April 21 earnings call, outgoing Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson told investors that "our manufacturing facilities are open and our workforce is engaged."

Concern for the safety of that workforce prompted Jennifer Escobar—a veteran and wife of a Lockheed Martin employee in Fort Worth who himself is a disabled veteran—to publicly denounce the company for staying open during the pandemic.

More than 5,000 people have signed her petition calling for the Fort Worth site to shut down and send employees home with pay. A similar petition on behalf of Lockheed Martin employees in Palmdale, Calif., garnered hundreds of signatures. Escobar spearheaded the campaign, she says, for "everybody else who couldn't stand up because they have a fear of retaliation from the employer."

Escobar also started a GoFundMe page for the widow of the Fort Worth site's first reported Covid-19 death. Claude Daniels, a material handler, and his wife, also a Lockheed employee, had together spent about seven decades working for the company, according to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union.

The local machinists union reported in late April that the Fort Worth site had 12 confirmed virus cases among Lockheed and non-Lockheed employees. Since the plant has remained open during the pandemic, the company has responded to the outbreak by identifying and informing workers who have been in proximity with an infected employee and asking them to stay home, according to a Lockheed spokesman.

But Escobar and one plant worker said there are gaps in that response. For example, Escobar says there were instances in which a worker was sent home while their spouse, also a company employee, was not, despite the presumably close contact the pair has in a shared living space. One Fort Worth worker also said that while the company will remove an employee who works within six feet of someone who tests positive, there are cases of people who work at greater distances—the employee gave the example of workers on either side of a jet's wings—who still share items during their shift.

"Even though we were sharing the same workstation, the same computer, the same toolbox, that doesn’t count," the employee says.

In response to these concerns, Lockheed Martin told In These Times via email, "Our Facilities teams have increased cleaning schedules within all our buildings and campuses across Lockheed Martin, with a high concentration on common areas like lobbies, restrooms, breakrooms and elevators. Upon learning of probable exposure, a contracted professional cleaning and restoration company sanitizes the employee’s workspace, surrounding workspaces, common areas, and entrances and exits throughout the building.”

Anger at the expectation employees continue working led one to spit on the company's gate in Fort Worth. Escobar says, "He was just really upset that the company was treating him like that."

Lockheed Martin spokesman Kenneth Ross told In These Times that the company's security team was aware of and investigating the reported spitting incident. "Obviously, that kind of behavior is not fitting with what we're trying to do to create a Covid-19 safe environment," he said

One Fort Worth employee infected with the virus filmed a video of himself from a hospital bed that went viral and was viewed by many of his coworkers. In sharing his story, he also exposed a gap in the company's ability to respond to the virus while maintaining its floors open.

In Anthony Melchor's video, which has been viewed more than 16,000 times, he is interrupted by coughs and wheezy breaths. "I'm cool on my stool, you know me," he says, warning his fellow workers that "this Covid ain’t no bullshit, man." He calls on them to sanitize their work areas and not go to work if they feel unsafe.

During a weekend in early April, Melchor, who suspects he was exposed to the virus at work, began to have severe migraines. He woke up the next day in a pool of sweat. His doctor ordered a Covid-19 test, but his first result was a false negative, which Melchor believes happened because his nasal swab was too shallow. After several days passed and his condition worsened, his wife insisted he receive medical attention. A second coronavirus test then came back positive, he said.

Melchor says his delay in informing Lockheed that he was positive for the virus also meant his coworkers were delayed in being removed from the line. Asked whether workers are removed from the plant when an employee shows symptoms of the virus or only after one has tested positive, a Lockheed spokesman wrote that the company "identif[ies] and inform[s] any employees who interacted with individuals exposed to or diagnosed with Covid-19 while maintaining confidentiality."

At a Lockheed Martin site in Greenville, S.C., where the company is currently producing F-16s for Bahrain—the company appears to have only foreign clients for the fighter jet—one employee expressed concern over how close workers get to one another when they often work in pairs on either side of a jet. The worker also says it is "the nature of our business" to have employees who frequently travel, including out of the country, leading the worker to fear what they may bring back to the workplace when they return.

"From a financial standpoint I know it’s not beneficial for us to be at home," the Greenville worker says, "but the safety of employees to me should be most important.”

Lockheed's fighter jets are among many defense products that U.S. companies export.

In addition to Lockheed Martin, In These Times submitted questions to three other defense firms about ongoing exports during Covid-19. Northrop Grumman announced in its April 29 earnings call that the company had delivered two Global Hawk surveillance drones to South Korea that month. Asked about the precautions the company took for the safety of workers handling the drones in the final weeks leading up to the April delivery, a spokesperson wrote that the company is "taking extraordinary measures to maintain safe working conditions." The U.S. ambassador in Seoul tweeted a picture of the sleek gray drone emblazoned with Korean letters in an April 19 message congratulating those involved in its delivery.

Another contractor, Wichita-based Textron Aviation, told In These Times that, during Covid-19, the company "will continue to support our customers according to our funded contract requirements, which includes foreign customers."

Jeff Abramson, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Arms Control Association, says the pandemic does not appear to have caused any "deviation" from the Trump administration's policy of promoting foreign arms sales. He notes that the State Department approved numerous potential sales, including ones to controversial clients like the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines, in the midst of the global pandemic.

"It certainly seems that this administration is trying to get a message to industry that you are important. There will be work for you," Abramson says.

Despite the essential designation, some Boeing defense-industrial sites buckled under pressure as the virus spread and closed during the pandemic. A day after the death of an employee infected with the virus in Washington State, Boeing announced it would shutter its Puget Sound site, where some 70,000 people work on both commercial and defense aircraft. Boeing also shut down a Pennsylvania site that produces military aircraft for two weeks, saying the step was "a necessary one for the health and safety of our employees and their communities."

When Boeing partially reopened Puget Sound after about three weeks, the first production it resumed was on defense products. Asked if work was underway on P-6 patrol aircraft for foreign clients such as South Korea and New Zealand, a company spokesperson responded, "We are evaluating customer delivery schedules and working to minimize impacts to our international customers."

Unlike the United States, some countries have allowed defense production to shut down. Mexico did not declare its defense industry essential, prompting a rebuke from the Pentagon's Ellen Lord, who wrote to the Mexican foreign ministry regarding interruptions to supply chains. Lord later said she had seen a "positive response" from Mexico on resolving the issue. F-35 facilities in both Japan and Italy shut down for several days in the early weeks of the pandemic.

Melchor, the Fort Worth employee who is now recovering from Covid-19 at home, says he agrees with the defense-industrial base's designation as essential, including when that involves commitments to customers amongst U.S. allies. "I just also believe that our customers would have understood if there was a two-week delay or even a month delay because of this virus," he says.

He believes leadership is needed to address the issue in a unified way and says debate about the crisis amongst workers, whom he called on in his video to "pull together," has become fractious.

"What I found interesting is the very thing that we build [is] to serve and protect, foreign and domestic, to protect us from any type of evil or wrongdoing," Melchor says. "At what point does our company protect us?"

An original version of this story said that U.S. companies make foreign arms sales in the order of $180 billion a year. While the U.S. State Department says that the U.S. government manages the transfer of approximately $43 billion in defense equipment to allies each year and provides regulatory approvals for more than $136 billion per year in defense sales abroad, others estimates of the volume of U.S. arms sales abroad have differed. A new report from the Center for International Policy says that the United States made at least $85.1 billion in arms sales offers in 2019. The report's authors call this figure "a floor, not a ceiling" and said the number is "almost assuredly an undercounting" due to lack of transparency in arms sales reporting.

]]>Taylor BarnesTue, 19 May 2020 12:30:00 +0000Perry Rosenstein: Building a Foundation for Art and Social Justicehttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22513/remembering-perry-rosenstein-puffin-foundation-independent-journalism/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22513/remembering-perry-rosenstein-puffin-foundation-independent-journalism/With the passing of Perry Rosenstein on April 3, In These Times lost a friend and American workers lost a champion.

Perry was the son of Polish Jews who, having immigrated to New York at the turn of the 20th century, became labor movement activists. His was among more than 700 working families who, in 1925, pooled their savings to build the United Workers Cooperative Colony, a residential housing co-op in the Bronx. At the time, “the Coops,” as it was known, was the largest residential housing cooperative in the United States.

This grand experiment in cooperative living (and its sad, self-inflicted demise) is documented in At Home in Utopia, a 2008 film by Michal Goldman.

Yok Ziebel grew up with Perry in the Coops. He explains in the film, “The main force of all the kids in the Coops—though we didn’t know it at the time—was politics.”

Pete Rosenblum, who lived in the apartment be-low Perry’s, recalls how, in the 1930s, the two of them scavenged for the silver papers that lined cigarette packs. The collected “metal” (so they were told) would be melted down into bullets for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Americans who, in the 1930s, fought for the Spanish Republic (aka the Second Spanish Republic) against Franco.

“It affected Perry like it affected me; it ruined us,” Pete laughs. “It instilled in us a Left spirit. We were part of the world.”

Following World War II and a stint as a union organizer in the steel mills of South Bend, Ind., Perry had hoped to become a teacher—but he was blacklisted because of his economic and racial justice work, so became a captain of industry instead. Perry’s innovative manufacture of screws and metal fasteners made him a multimillionaire. In 1983, Perry put his fortune to work for the progressive movement and established the Puffin Foundation, which supports individual artists, independent journalism, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives at New York University and the Puffin Gallery for Social Activism at the Museum of the City of New York.

In 2009, the economic fallout from the Great Recession forced In These Times to lay off half the staff. Perry, as president of the Puffin Foundation, stepped up to help fund the “In These Times Growth Plan,” which grew our subscriber base to 38,000 (up from fewer than 10,000 in 2010) and our full-time staff to 10 (up from 4 in 2010).

We are where we are today because Perry supported the publication of the magazine you hold in your hands. We honor him for his support of independent media. His legacy lives on in the pages of In These Times.

]]>Joel BleifussMon, 18 May 2020 18:27:00 +0000To Win Elections, Should the Left Be Nicer on the Internet?http://inthesetimes.com/article/22532/2020-primary-election-civility-twitter-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22532/2020-primary-election-civility-twitter-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren/This is part of a roundtable on lessons from the 2020 primaries. Read Maximillian Alvarez's response here.

A modest proposal for the Left as it sorts through the ashes of the Democratic primary and considers how to improve its next major electoral run: Be nicer on the Internet.

In some quarters of the Left, this sentiment is considereda distraction from more substantive issues of campaigning. But the lessons of 2020 suggest that the toxic aspects of the online culture of the Left were a salient part of the political climate, and may have dampened Sanders’s ability to coalition-build with progressives outside his core base—most notably, Warren supporters—who could’ve helped defeat Joe Biden at the polls. A renewed focus on civility in the electoral sphere could expand the mass appeal of leftist thinking, and it could also have salutary effects within the Left by reminding itself what it means to foster a truly democratic culture.

There is reason to think that this behavior may have influenced broader perception of Sanders as a candidate. Exit polling indicates that 10to20 percent of early primary state voters used Twitter regularly for political news, and that Sanders supporters generally constituted only a narrow plurality of this set, meaning plenty of Dems outside of BernieWorld were likely witnessing some online skirmishes. The fact that mainstream journalists (many of whom already appeared keen on undermining Sanders’s campaign) were relentlessly targeted by hardcore Sandernista ire likely contributed to the issue being repeatedly raised in televised town halls, debates and long, reported pieces, ensuring that even those who didn’t witness it heard about it happening to it someone else. After dropping out of the race, Warren, sat down with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and spoke for seven minutes about online harassment among Sanders supporters in an interview which was expected to be a potential endorsement platform.

The pervasiveness of this idea couldn’t have done Sanders any favors in trying to win over Warren supporters early on in the primary season — when a clearplurality of them saw Sanders as their second choice—and it may have hurt his ability to secure them as her star fell. We don’t have definitive evidence demonstrating a causal link, but manyWarrensupportersonlinedidcomplainabout ill-tempered Sanders supporters and linked it to an aversion to backing him; and The Daily Beast’s politics editor Sam Stein reported that the culture surrounding Sanders supporters was a turn-off among Warren supporters town halls he attended. We also know that high-profile candidate signaling was hugely influential in this crowded race—Rep. Jim Clyburn’s backing helped Biden dominate in South Carolina, and Buttigieg and Klobuchar seamlessly funneled their supporters to the former veep before Super Tuesday—and so Warren’s repeated complaints about Sanders’s online following, coupled with her non-endorsement, was likely a meaningful hit against him.

Vilifying and alienating Warren and her supporters should be understood as an unforced error. It was necessary to highlight the differences between Sanders and Warren in the run-up to the primaries, but it was possible to draw distinctions without burning the bridges that were needed for progressive consolidation later down the line.

Some on the Left argued that Warren, whose base skewed more college-educated and affluent than Sanders’s base, had different class interests than the working class voters Sanders was most focused on enticing to the voting booth, and thus spurning Warren voters was of no consequence.

But the reality is many Warren supporters were open to Sanders’ policy agenda. We know this because Sanders and Warren overwhelmingly agreed on key domestic policy objectives; because Warren supporters included a substantial bloc of former Sanders supporters; and because throughout much of 2019 she was the top choice among very liberal Democrats. This shouldn’t be a surprise—college education correlates strongly with support for progressive policies, including aggressive redistributionist policies. In other words, there is no reason to believe that Sanders’s platform would need to be compromised to appeal to the higher-income professionals that made up Warren’s electoral sweet spot, even if they weren’t the prime beneficiary of some of his policy goals.

And the case for being open-minded toward Warren voters is strengthened further by the fact that Sanders proved unable to turn out first-time and disaffected working class voters en masse as he had hoped to. Why should the Left turn away a potential voting bloc that comes at no cost to its policy platform when it is still in the process of building an electorally meaningful left-wing working class base—a process that could take generations, given the weakness of labor unions and the immense hurdles to voting while poor?

Some on the Left say that the complaints about aggressive Sanders behavior was overblown, since every candidate had its share of abusive supporters, and it may be the case that perception of Sanders’ more abrasive crowd really is in part a function of the fact that he has a much larger online following. But this fails as a counterargument for a couple of reasons. First, it’s no secret that some influential groups in Leftie discourse online actively advocate for being adversarial as a conscious political tactic—and so it’s not just fringe behavior of random individuals. But more importantly, saying “but the other side does it, too!” isn’t an appropriate stance for a political movement that is small and growing, and whose premise for entry into mainstream electoral politics is that it is elevating standards for justice and fairness. Simply put, the Left should hold itself to higher standards than the Democratic establishment in rhetoric, just the way it does on policy. If there was a cost associated with trying to be a bit nicer, then a discussion about trade-offs would make sense. But there are no costs—and there are obvious potential upsides.

This is not a call for the Left to be docile. Rather, it’s a case for leftists online to see themselves as surrogates for their cause, and to develop a discerning and strategic eye when it comes to being antagonistic. Rage is a real political tool, but outright vitriol should be reserved for people and organizations who deserve it most; organizing a street fight against neo-Nazis or mobilizing a strike against a brutal boss requires a different set of energies and affects than putting together the numbers for winning a national election. The US’s two-party system necessarily entails assembling coalitions, and both 2016 and 2020 show that the math is punishing to those who ignore that reality.

Do we know if online behavior played a decisive role for a substantial chunk of Warren supporters? It’s unclear. Is it possible that even without the factor of obnoxious Bernie supporters, that many of Warren’s progressive supporters would have declined to pivot to Sanders? Certainly. It is, after all, possible that her identities as a wonk or a firebrand feminist were essential to sealing the deal with some of her followers. But we know for a fact that many were intrigued by or fully behind Sanders’s policy agenda, and that those people were not systematically courted as potential allies.

On the surface, it might seem petty for a progressive to decline to back Sanders and fall in line with Biden because someone was a dick to them online, or perhaps even in person. I personally don’t think it’s nearly good enough of a reason to side with Biden’s status quo restoration agenda. But any movement that blames voters for not voting for them is never going to be a serious one. And so it's worth thinking more deeply about why some people are so bothered by rudeness and bullying online, and trying to understand what it signals to people on the outside. It seems likely that people view it as a signal that a movement is not inclusive, and inhospitable to internal debate.

Learning to value persuasion over pillorying when thinking about winning over voters is not just PR—it’s true to the spirit of a truly democratic Left. Creating a political climate in which people within or adjacent to the movement can reason with each other rather than shout each other down is a precondition for the robust flow of ideas and the social inclusiveness needed to make the Left a real home for those who have been pushed to the margins.

]]>Zeeshan AleemMon, 18 May 2020 11:31:00 +0000Class Traitors, Welcome to the Revolutionhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22509/ally-working-class-liberal-professionals-2020-elections-sanders-warren/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22509/ally-working-class-liberal-professionals-2020-elections-sanders-warren/This is a response to Zeeshan Aleem's piece, "To Win Elections, Should the Left Be Nicer on the Internet?", and part of a roundtable on lessons from the 2020 primaries.

The 2020 Democratic primary breathed momentary life back into the promise of political alternatives for working people. Once again, that promise has been snuffed out.

For progressives and leftists, now is the time for tough questions, one of the most critical and enduring of which will be: What genuine barriers to building a winning coalition emerged from this race and what, in retrospect, was just manufactured noise designed to divide us? How much substance is there, for instance, to the charge that a “toxic” online culture cultivated by an ill-defined contingent of Bernie Sanders supporters on social media platforms constituted a serious (and statistically relevant) impediment to building such a coalition?

I’ve received my fair share of digital death threats and online harassment, so I’m deeply sympathetic to those who have experienced the cruelty the internet can conjure. For this reason, and in the interest of maintaining good faith, I tend to think that most calls for political “civility” genuinely come from a good place. Whether or not they acknowledge that such calls generally serve (and can be cynically employed) to selectively muzzle or disqualify the righteous outrage of those who are systematically dehumanized by our political economy, I get why civility matters to people, and I think most people mean well. I think we believe that, if we can simply clear out all the fire and noise, we can find the threads that connect us—and we do crave that connection.

As a writer, podcaster, and neighbor, I spend the bulk of my time trying to listen for and fortify the ties that bind the working class together—a working class that­ is bigger and more diverse than most realize, but whose members have far more in common than our exploiters and dominators would have us believe. These truths about the varied lives and common interests of working people crystallized, however briefly, in the impressively diverse working-class base that rallied behind the Bernie Sanders campaign, from college students and workers in service and retail to farmers, nurses and social workers. But, in the end, the base wasn’t big enough.

It was always an exceedingly tall task for the Sanders camp to bring in a critical mass of supporters from the pool of non-voters who have been, for so long, so systematically disempowered and disaffected by the same political and economic systems that offer them so little in return. Still, it is a goal worth working toward, a dream worth fighting for. A movement capable of securing justice, dignity and a livable planet for working people everywhere demands we continue to expand the political power of the working class itself. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, the question remains: What other groups of people—and how many—do we need with us to win at the ballot box?

One obvious place to look is in the pool of existing Democratic primary voters, specifically the more progressive-leaning members of the professional class who also believe we deserve better than our present lot. These statistically older, more educated, higher-paid professionals (especially white women)—from professors and librarians to lawyers and doctors and those in the nonprofit sector—tended to support Elizabeth Warren.

Regardless of what seems like a natural overlap between Warren and Sanders supporters in their commitment to progressive values, polling after Super Tuesday revealed the preferred second choice for Warren voters was a between Sanders and Joe Biden—with a significant portion (especially older, white, college-educated women) voting for Biden after Warren dropped out.

Arguably, Bernie would have won if he had the full support of Warren voters—and so could a future left candidate. The reasons Warren supporters moved on to Biden instead are varied: Many, including Warren herself, blame an alienating “incivility” and “toxic online culture” among Sanders supporters. Some carry an unshakeable grudge toward Sanders for running a “divisive campaign” against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Others, worried about a second Trump victory, swallowed the Democratic punditry’s case that Biden is just a safer bet.

Frankly, I don’t know if a large majority of Warren voters are open to being won over. Nor am I confident that what policy concessions working people would have to give up would be worth the victory. It seems either disingenuous or naïve to suggest that, if only some people were nicer online, more self-described progressive Warren supporters would have committed to the one then-viable progressive candidate fighting for substantive, desperately needed policies that would alleviate the suffering of working people—from the Green New Deal and Medicare for All to ending “right to work” and at-will employment. To the tens of millions of workers who have lost their jobs and healthcare during the Covid-19 crisis, are the “progressives” who chose to support Biden, the alleged sexual abuser who hasn’t changed his mind about universal healthcare, not practicing something far worse, and far more tangible, than “incivility”?

This is precisely where the well-grounded political skepticism of working people is vitally instructive. Perhaps it was never really a question of liberal professionals’ stated progressive values but of demonstrated commitment to them—and to the people whose lives, along with your own, they are supposed to improve. If those values can be jettisoned over some bad online interactions, what reason do people who are buried in debt and can be fired at will have to see them as allies? I ask these questions in the most serious and un-petty way possible. We must remember: In terms of electoral viability, progressive professionals who supported Warren lost, too, and lost big. So, this street goes both ways. If Warren’s statistically more educated and higher-paid supporters do believe in progressive values, if they want to see those values win out, and if they feel they need Sanders’ supporters as much as we need them to achieve that victory, they need to sit with these questions, too.

Again, I don’t know how many Warren supporters are willing to be won over; that’s more up to them than to me. However, I know there are (potentially) progressive-leaning professionals we can and should appeal to, and forming a coalition with them means cutting through the noise and building on the foundations of the common—the things we all deserve and are all denied, in one form or another, by this system.

The dream of socioeconomic stability for the middle and professional classes has died alongside the dream of upward mobility for the poor and working class. Even if they won’t admit it out loud, many professionals know they are closer to their working-class counterparts than they are to CEOs in corner offices. The 2008 crash taught many of them a hard lesson about their own precariousness and disposability; Covid-19 and its ensuing economic turmoil will ensure they never forget it. No professional with an ounce of humility can escape the fear that their healthcare, their homes, their livelihoods—all of it can go away like that. Nor can they escape that gnawing realization that, when they pack up their desks, their names will be forgotten in a week.

That fear is why they, like most working-class stiffs, work around the clock, sacrificing their time, joy, families and freedom—all in the vain hope of securing a foothold in a system that can and will replace them at its leisure. These are people we can build a movement with, those who are willing to hear the call echoing from their hearts to ours: What kind of life is this?

These are the terms on which any discussion of a political coalition between Sanders and Warren supporters needs to take place. Debates about toxic “online culture” and the like are, by and large, noise. A red herring. They matter most to people who have no other substantive connections to one other beyond Twitter (that goes double for the pundit class). People are much more complex than their social media avatars. And, across the political arena, a certain percentage of them (not just Sanders supporters) will always suck online. We need to accept that, and get over it. It is an infinitely more possible—and valuable—endeavor for us to supplement our online interactions with deeper, more empathetic connections to the lives and struggles of our neighbors than to try to turn social media into something it just isn’t (and to spin myopic narratives about who's responsible when we inevitably fail to do so).

Moving forward, then, the real issue is not to chide some for speaking truth the wrong way but to get others angry for the right reasons and to enlist them as allies. Doing so means we have to ultimately find ways to convince a critical mass of progressive professionals to become class traitors by ensuring them that, where the present system would let them fall, the society we fight for will catch them—and, together, we can make sure no one falls.

Read other perspectives on lessons for the Left from the 2020 primaries:

]]>Maximillian AlvarezMon, 18 May 2020 11:31:00 +0000Black Voters Are Ready. Are We?http://inthesetimes.com/article/22507/Bernie-Sanders-black-voters-electability-2020-election/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22507/Bernie-Sanders-black-voters-electability-2020-election/This is part of a roundtable on lessons from 2020 that the Left can use to win future presidential elections.

It’s been three and a half months since the South Carolina Democratic primary. As the story goes, it was there former Vice President Joe Biden and “Black America” drew a line in the sand and crashed the Bernie wave. What happened next confirmed that narrative in the minds of pundits and prognosticators: Joe Biden continued to win Black voters by large margins and, emboldened by the endorsements of former opponents and buttressed by Black support—as it was dubbed by a (very) few—swept Biden to the Democratic nomination, officially closing the book on the Vermont senator and his motley crew of Medicare for All-ers.

But here’s another story.

As a national surrogate for (and, briefly, senior advisor to) the Sanders campaign, I traveled over six and a half months of the primary to Florida, Iowa, South Carolina, North Carolina, Nevada, California, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Washington, D.C. We sat and listened in barber shops, beauty salons, coffee shops, bookstores, sneaker shops, bars, community centers, community colleges, high schools, universities, homes and offices. What I witnessed was the same as what polling reflected: Black people—my people—support Medicare for All, marijuana legalization, ending the war on drugs, free college and trade schools, raises for all teachers and more—much of which agenda originated from Black radical ideas.

Knowing all this, it is admittedly hard for me to swallow that our people voted for Biden in such large numbers. Joe Biden is utterly bereft of vision and out of step with the moment, the last of a dying breed in a dying party, a bastion of a bygone age who required every bit of party machinery to get into gear and push a sputtering campaign across the finish line.

But many older Black folks didn’t believe we could accomplish the ambitious progressive platform that Sanders laid out. It felt like a gamble. And older Black people do not gamble or experiment at the ballot box.

Young Black people, however, overwhelmingly supported the Sanders platform and—to a lesser but growing extent—the more radical agenda of the Movement for Black Lives. But we have a ways to go to earn their excitement, commitment and membership in our ranks, let along their determination to vote in the face of rampant and targeted voter disenfranchisement.

Most Black people—young or old—do not “know” the Black-led Left or the “Bernie, DSA Left,” at least not as a contemporary, consistent, powerful, organized, winning force in their lives. We must change that.

If we on the Left are to grab hold of our destiny, we must wrestle with our organizing shortcomings. We just are not organizing as deeply and as widely as the moment and the future requires. The Left can win in 2022, 2024, and beyond only if we are willing to get off Twitter and launch innovative and vibrant campaigns and build alternative examples of the world we want tomorrow, today.

As we face this pandemic, for example, Black people and poor people (of all colors, including poor white people) are struggling; the Left must seize the opportunity to live our politics in public. In addition to our vital political demands, we must build national mutual aid programs to serve and protect the most vulnerable (while still making strategic demands on government). In times of need, people remember the people who were there—not as saviors, but as people who do what they say they will.

In rural counties along with the big cities, we must launch left candidates to vie for power and assemble alternative left groups to address specific needs with left policies that fit. The Left needs to show as models the places where we have won, the places where we have innovated new governance and economic frameworks. Through example, we can enact the left policies that become the practice for our class, race, gender and sexual politics. Here, we can translate our principles and our vision into a language easily understood by those struggling through neoliberal nightmares.

We must live in the hearts, experiences and minds of our people. Successful left movements animate the masses with art, music, dance and poetry. Without art and culture, our movement marches where it should sway, our speeches stultify where they should sing. Capital isolates and alienates. The Left is where the heart is.

Lastly, to win, we must protect and expand enfranchisement. Left organizations must invest in year-round voter registration, education and mobilization. Too long have we relied on a donor class and a Democratic establishment that abhor true democracy to invest in the democratic process.

Bernie Sanders proves the Left needs more than a charismatic presidential candidate (though it would help and be a whole lot of fun). We need a more diverse base of people, namely more Black people. That base needs a Left with answers, action, experimentation and strategy. A Left that is concerned to the material lives of rural and urban working people. A Left that has the courage to govern in the midst of contradiction, the strength to serve in crisis, the power to protect the ballot box, presence of mind to grapple with race, class and gender—and the creativity to build a movement that feels, loves and breathes.

The road before us is demanding, but it leads to victory. A luta continua.

]]>Phillip AgnewMon, 18 May 2020 11:31:00 +0000How to Unionize During Covid-19http://inthesetimes.com/article/22531/how-to-unionize-during-covid-19/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22531/how-to-unionize-during-covid-19/Maximillian AlvarezFri, 15 May 2020 21:52:00 +0000Trump’s “Reopening” Is a Red Herringhttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22527/trump-reopening-covid-coronavirus-republicans-contact-tracing-testing/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22527/trump-reopening-covid-coronavirus-republicans-contact-tracing-testing/When President Trump, Republican leaders, right-wing think tanks and billionaire CEOs aggressively push to send people back to work before the coronavirus is contained, this is not a “reopening.” It’s the opposite: an unraveling of the conditions that we need to safely and sustainably reopen our society. While the red herring of a “reopening” has dominated news cycles and Trump administration press conferences, the United States has moved ever further away from what we all desperately seek: a point at which this all ends, and it’s safe to go to the library, stroll maskless through a park, eat dinner with a loved one, and go to work without fear. The Right doesn’t own the “reopening” terrain—it has forfeited it by barreling down a road that leads to mass death, suffering, and more and more closures down the road.

Forty-two states have either started “reopening” their economies or imminently plan to do so, despite the fact that most of them have failed to meet even the non-binding criteria put forward by the White House: that they have a 14-day “downward trajectory” of known coronavirus cases or rates of positive tests (this standard was criticized by public health experts for being ill-defined and insufficient). Alarmingly, as of May 7, more than half of the states that had either reopened or planned to do so (30 at the time) have seen an increase in case counts or positive tests over the past two weeks, according to a tracker from the New York Times. In Georgia, for example, testing levels are well below the minimum recommended by experts, and positive test rates remain above a threshold of 10%. Yet Georgia’s governor, Republican Brian Kemp, has instructed nail salons and bowling alleys to open. Kemp presented himself as the champion of workers he is sending into perilous condition, declaring April 17, “I know people are chomping [at the bit] to get back to work.” Trump has embraced the state-level push to reopen, and even encouraged protests against governors who maintain shelter-in-place instructions, declaring in late April, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”

It is no mystery what is going to happen as a result of this push. There is a consensus among experts that the United States doesn’t have the measures in place to reopen without causing mass death. As the New York Timesnoted on May 11, “Deaths are already far higher than the 60,000 once predicted by August. Even President Trump has begun to talk of a toll that may reach 100,000, perhaps more.” An Associated Pressanalysis from May 12 found that even as Trump pushes the country towards a swift reopening, “thousands of people are getting sick from COVID-19 on the job.” There are signs of new coronavirus hot spots around the country, including in states that are reopening. Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Tom Frieden has been vocal about the dire consequences. “We’re not reopening based on science,” he told the Times. “We’re reopening based on politics, ideology and public pressure. And I think it’s going to end badly.” We already know Black, Latino and poor people are disproportionately dying from Covid-19—this horrific trend is almost certain to continue in subsequent spikes.

“We are way premature for opening when the cases nationwide have not gone down but continue to go up,” Deborah Burger, the co-president of National Nurses United (NNU), told In These Times. “We are still experiencing a rationing of personal protective equipment, N95 masks, and other protective gear. We just did a vigil for over 100 nurses who have died.”

Dire warnings have even been issued by Trump’s own health officials. On May 12, two of the top health officials in the federal government warned a Senate committee that the coronavirus is not contained and that reopening too swiftly is profoundly dangerous. Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, leading U.S. infectious disease expert, warned that “there is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control.” Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the current director of the CDC—who was hired by Trump and has a disturbing history of handling the AIDS epidemic—pleaded, “We are not out of the woods yet.”

Yet, in public discourse, the language of “reopening” is being largely conceded to the right. Art Laffer, the economist behind Reagan-era tax cuts, has received considerable media coverage calling for wages to be slashed and workers to be sent back to their jobs at risk to their lives. So has the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation, which has publicly flaunted its reopening “wish list” which excludes robust testing. We are not seeing similar air time given to any vision of a safe, public-health-focused reopening. Democrats have, by and large, failed to make this framing central to their strategy, much less go on the offense against the cynical and deadly GOP strategy.

As the Right marches us into dangerous thickets, we’re not taking the steps we need to find our way out of the woods. Social distancing is just one tool to slow the spread of the virus and prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed by the need for acute care. But until we have a vaccine, additional tools are vital to minimize the spread of the virus: contact tracing and testing.

Contact tracing involves identifying and contacting those who have tested positive for Covid-19, discovering who they have been in contact with, and reaching out to those contacts to ensure that they quarantine themselves. Of course, any such effort must remain firmly under the purview of public health, subject to the highest privacy standards like HIPAA protections, and never be used for surveillance, policing, or private data collection (some states’ reliance on the National Guard and tech companies for contact tracing raises profound concerns). While this approach may be difficult to imagine in the United States, whose default posture is a law enforcement response to social problems, it’s eminently feasible—unlike a safe reopening without contact tracing and before we have a vaccine.

A contact tracing program would require a minimum of 100,000 new workers, and former CDC director Tom Frieden suggests it could take up to 300,000. In their latest HEROES Act, which utterly fails to create a robust social safety net, House Democrats proposed $75 billion for “testing, contact tracing, and other activities necessary to effectively monitor and suppress Covid-19.” But there is no political sign that a coordinated contact tracing effort will be adopted on a national level anytime soon. Instead, we are seeing a patchwork of state initiatives that leave large swaths of the country without this key public health protection.

Widespread testing, carried out firmly in the public health domain, must go hand-in-hand with a contact tracing plan, according to experts. After all, it is testing that allows tracers to track people who are potentially infected. In a position statement on what a public reopening should look like, NNU calls for widespread contact tracing and testing. “Free, reliable polymerase chain reaction testing must be made widely available—including to low-income communities and communities of color—regardless of known exposure or symptom status,” the union declares.

Natalie Dean, a biostatistics professor at the University of Florida, told Vox, “The whole point of this social distancing is to buy us time to build up capacity to do the types of public health interventions we know work. If we’re not using this time to scale up testing to the level that we need it to be … we don’t have an exit strategy. And then when we lift things, we’re no better equipped than we were before.”

This is not a fringe position. World Health Organization spokesperson Dr. Margaret Harris toldCNN, “You need to check that people who have symptoms actually have the virus, and then find people who they've been in contact with and isolate them. If you can't do that, then you go back to square one."

It’s an understatement to say Trump has squandered this opportunity. While experts have called for mass testing—from 500,000 to tens of millions of tests per day, the United States has averaged far less: about 260,000 daily tests. As Vox noted on May 11, “when controlling for population, America is behind several countries in terms of Covid-19 testing,” namely Denmark, New Zealand, Germany, Canada and Italy.

The contrast between the United States and South Korea is stark. By the end of February, South Korea had the second worst outbreak of coronavirus in the world, next to China. Yet, as Derek Thompson writes at The Atlantic, “just as South Korea appeared to be descending into catastrophe, the country stopped the virus in its tracks. It accomplished this through a combination of widespread contact tracing, testing, and fastidious isolation of those sick or at risk of infection.” Business Insider noted in a May 9 article, “South Korea's testing total so far, when broken down into number of tests performed per million citizens, seems to be about 700 times” that of the United States.

South Korea’s response was not without its problems. Its use of surveillance in contract tracing opens the door to government snooping and privacy violation beyond the pandemic. But these civil liberties concerns are not what’s stunted the U.S. response. Rather, the cause lies in decades of deliberate right-wing attacks on public goods and a pathological indifference to Black and Brown lives from our ruling elite.

And even South Korea’s controlled opening was dangerous, leading to a cluster of new cases in Seoul, prompting that city’s mayor to indefinitely close all bars and clubs. But even considering this spike, South Korea’s outbreak has been dramatically less lethal than that in the United States. According toVox, “As of May 11, the country of about 50 million people has had nearly 11,000 confirmed infections and over 250 deaths, compared with roughly 1.3 million cases and more than 80,000 deaths in the US, which is home to 330 million.”

Corporate media is also uncritically repeating the line that radical anti-science Republican governors are pushing a “reopening” when they’re simply delaying another inevitable shutdown. “Georgia governor to outline steps to reopen state's economy,” an Atlanta Journal Constitution headline reads. “[Florida] Governor announces reopening plan for state” the Miami Heraldtells us. “Reopening” is presented as the objective when every epidemiology model tells us their efforts will have the opposite effect—the rush to “reopen” with no testing or vaccine will just expedite the spread of the disease, cause more death, then lead to an un-reopening. These aren’t efforts to “reopen”—they are instead public relations gestures to appease corporate interests and bolster their own image of “doing something.”

If Trump or any of these Republican governors touting their “reopening” showed up to a press conference and announced they had cracked Cold fusion, or invented a perpetual motion machine, these brazenly anti-science gimmicks would not be reported on without a heavy dose of skepticism. Why then are their equally dubious plans to “reopen” the economy with zero buy-in from the science community not treated with equal contempt and incredulity?

Yet, Trump has repeatedly dismissed calls for increased testing capacity, bizarrely using the Covid-19 infection of Katie Miller, press secretary to Mike Pence and wife of Trump aide Stephen Miller, to make his point. "This is why the whole concept of tests aren't necessarily great. The tests are perfect but something can happen between the test where it's good and then something happens and, all of a sudden, she was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess, for some reason she tested positive," Trump said May 8. Responding to these comments, Dean Baker, economist and co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told In These Times, “I don't think Trump literally understands testing as an issue.”

While Trump refuses to adopt these basic building blocks of a public health response, far more is needed. It is impossible to divorce public health measures to contain the virus from social programs to ensure people are able survive in the interim. People must have houses in order to self-isolate, and a guaranteed income in order to stay home. Prisons, jails and immigrant detention centers, which have become petri dishes for the virus, must be emptied—lest we subject people to a possible death sentence. Economist Dean Baker underscores that we need robust worker protections and a revitalization of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “OSHA has been gutted for decades and cut back its capacity enormously,” he tells In These Times. “OSHA should have been proactive—it should have been out in front.” In the world’s largest military empire, we also have a unique responsibility to stop the wars, bombings, and sanctions that are making the world more vulnerable to the coronavirus, from Iran to Yemen.

That is to say, the Left has an opportunity to articulate a vision for a safe, humane, and just reopening—something the Democratic leadership is failing, or unwilling, to do. While the GOP opens the door to mass death, Democrats are failing to fight for a robust safety net that would allow people to shelter in place without facing food insecurity, mass suffering and destitution. Their paltry, one-time checks and unemployment insurance that excludes countless millions, including all undocumented people, has left countless people free-falling without a net. A hasty reopening is worse, but it is unconscionable that Democrats are not fighting for a model of sheltering in place that is actually viable for the vast majority of U.S. residents.

Even as ordinary people struggle, they still want society to adhere to public health standards. Despite the outsized media attention given to astroturfed “reopen” rallies, polling suggests that the rush to reopen goes against the will of a majority of people in the United States. According to a Yahoo News/YouGov coronavirus poll published May 8, 59% of people in the United States think the reopening of states like Georgia, Florida, Minnesota and Texas is “moving too fast,” just 33% think it’s “about right,” and 8% think it’s “too slow.” Another Yahoo News/YouGov poll, conducted April 17 to 19, finds 71% of people in the United States are more worried about reopening too quickly than too slowly, only 29% are concerned about opening too slowly.

There is public will to do what’s needed to prevent people from being sacrificed, yet the Right is pushing a fake reopening that will only kill people and invite more shutdowns. As long as Democrats and the Left cede the ground of what “reopening” should look like, the messaging war is being lost. Everyone urgently wants to see a genuine reopening. We must show that we have a real, workable plan to do so—and that people’s present sacrifices are towards this ultimate goal—not treat a rushed, far-right campaign as something remotely resembling what a real “reopening” would look like. It’s not, and we need to make sure the public knows this.

]]>Sarah LazareThu, 14 May 2020 18:23:00 +0000The Covid-19 Crisis Shows Why Food Should Be a Human Righthttp://inthesetimes.com/article/22526/covid-19-crisis-food-human-right-bank-lines/
http://inthesetimes.com/article/22526/covid-19-crisis-food-human-right-bank-lines/Within weeks of the U.S. outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, as states started implementing stay-at-home orders, it was already becoming painfully apparent that local food banks would face severe duress. The need for food assistance rapidly increased across the country as working families on the edge found themselves without a source of income, and unemployment insurance had yet to kick in. Food banks encountered a sudden surge in demand making it difficult to serve everyone in need. Local news stations were replete with stories of cars lining up at food banks, with families hoping supplies would still be available when they reached the front of the line.

This should not have been a surprise. An estimated 4 in 10 Americans already didn’t have $400 in the bank to cover an emergency before the crisis. Things were bound to get worse with the deluge of Covid-19 related layoffs. The looming problem should have been obvious even a year ago, when a Morning Consult survey of approximately 2,200 U.S. adults revealed that nearly a quarter of Americans were sliding into debt in order to pay for necessities—specifically rent, utilities and food.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Household Food Security in the United States report released last September, more than 37 million Americans struggle with hunger. Nearly 15 million households were deemed food insecure, lacking access, at times, to provide enough food for all household members. These problems clearly beset the impoverished, including children, veterans, seniors and the recently unemployed.

This difficult state of affairs was only exacerbated by the Covid-19 crisis, which has put immediate stress on the system of food banks across the nation. And the dramatic lines at food banks make it clear that demand by the public will not abate anytime soon.

In response to this crisis, through the CARES Act, Congress allocated a one-time $1,200 direct payment to most Americans—a version of a universal basic income (UBI) that would have been a political nonstarter before the pandemic. Yet this assistance has still been inadequate for millions facing personal financial crisis.

In mid-April, Reps. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), introduced legislation to give $2,000 per month to every American age 16 and older making less than $130,000, through what they called the Emergency Money for the People Act.

It remains to be seen whether this approach will be taken up as Congress considers a subsequent Covid-19 relief package.

An alternative option would be to provide guaranteed food security for all U.S. residents, as well as a means to deliver it—ensuring food itself as a human right.

Such an approach may seem far fetched, but consider the fact that food is a necessity of life. Progressives regularly make the case that healthcare and education are human rights. Why not food? And while they are by no means universal, we do already have “transitional” institutions to provide these services in the United States that have been in place long before the Covid-19 pandemic.

In lieu of a full single-payer health insurance program, we have the transitional model of Medicare, in existence for Americans 65 and older since 1966. For tuition-free college education, we have state-run (and even city-run) colleges across the country—going back to the original example of the City College of New York created in 1847—virtually ready to transition into tuition-free institutions given enough funding and the right set of political and economic circumstances.

And as for the predecessor to delivering food as a universal human right, we have Food Stamps, or what has been called, since 2008, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Early versions go back to the New Deal era, including efforts by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace and the program's first administrator, Milo Perkins, between 1939 and 1943. There were additional “pilot programs” in the early 1960s, but it was The Food Stamp Act of 1964 that cemented the effort.

If the current means-tested SNAP program is transitional, the logical next step would be to make it universal, with the current role of the states significantly reduced, if not eliminated.

Means-tested programs tend to be politically vulnerable, regularly assaulted by the political right as “handouts” to the poor. On the other hand, universal programs are more popular, particularly in a crisis, and understood as fundamentally good for society. This should be an easy case to make when it comes to food, especially right now. (And if there are people who might not “need” the expanded SNAP, there should be qualified food banks where their SNAP credit could be contributed.)

Under such an expanded SNAP program, adult individuals could be provided $300 per month, plus $225 per dependent. This figure is more than twice the average amount currently received via SNAP. The roughly 40 million Americans who currently receive food stamps could quickly benefit from this increased aid. The 65 million Americans currently receiving Social Security, meanwhile, would get a well-deserved boost to their monthly checks. This approach would also provide a benefit for frontline “essential” workers—those laboring in hospitals, firefighters, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, postal workers, farmworkers, those in pharmacies, transportation, and others who have had to keep working to pull society back from collapse.

As we discuss appropriate relief for Americans to survive this current crisis, there are currently three categories of aid in the debate that go directly to the public: A combination of work-payment relief and/or a boost to unemployment insurance; the reduction, delay, or forgiveness of debt when considering mortgage, rent, utilities and higher education loans; and medical relief for Covid-19 testing and care, moving in the direction of Medicare for All.

Surely, a move to guarantee food security to everyone—SNAP for all—should be part of the mix in the next federal relief package. Rather than overwhelming the existing food banks that we have, wouldn’t it be wiser to guarantee everyone an absolute minimum food diet? Clearly, feeding everyone at these minimum amounts should not be seen as a luxury. It’s a rock-bottom minimum, and a way to finally establish food as an essential right.